You probably don't need Lodash in Nestjs - Connie's Programming Journey

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I completed Angular Architect Training Course from Bonnie Brennan at Angular Nation and lesson 1 is about style and structure. Even though the tips are for Angular application but a couple of them applies to NestJS. One of them is to void fat libraries such as lodash and moment.

In this post, I am going to describe how I limited the import size and usage of lodash library in our NestJS project at work.

Lodash contains a lot of useful functions but it is a rather large library with the size of 70kb. When developers import an lodash function using ES6 import, they are in fact import the entire library into the file that is unexpected.

After reading few blog posts, I found out that both statements are equivalent and import the whole library to file

import _ from ‘lodash’
import { sort } from ‘lodash’

Even though NestJS app resides in server side and bundle size is not a criterial factor, I wish to import lodash functions that the project is using only and replace other lodash functions with native JS.

you-dont-use-lodash-underscore plugin

NestJS app uses eslint to lint files; therefore, I installed eslint plugin, eslint-plugin-you-dont-need-lodash-underscore, and extended it in eslintrc.js

npm install --save-dev eslint-plugin-you-dont-need-lodash-underscore

"extends" : ["plugin:you-dont-need-lodash-underscore/compatible"]

Execute npm run lint command on terminal and the plugin outputted lodash errors. For example, uniq, flatten and omit can be replaced with native JS.

I overrided @typescript-eslint/no-unused-vars rule such that eslint does not complain unused variable(s) when rest spread operator is used

"no-unused-vars": "off",
"@typescript-eslint/no-unused-vars": ["error", { "ignoreRestSiblings": true }]

// Replace omit with rest spread operator
const something = omit(object, ['p1'])

const { p1, ...something } = object

// Replace uniq with Array destructuring and Set 
const u = uniq([1,2,3,1,1,1])

const u = [...new Set<number>([1,2,3,1,1,1])]

// Replace flatten with Array.flat if ES2019 is used
const f = flatten([1,[2,3], 4)

const f = [1,[2,3], 4].flat()

When all lodash errors were resolved, re-run npm run lint and it produced zero errors

Correct way to import lodash

I tried

import pick from 'lodash/pick'

but the compiler complained. When I used

 import pick = require('lodash/pick')

it worked perfectly.

These are the steps I used to replace lodash functions with light-weight alternatives and import the rest one by one.

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