Question

I have a piece of JavaScript that is designed to be run inside NodeJS, otherwise it breaks (for instance, it makes use of require()). I’d like to make a runtime check that it’s inside NodeJS and produce a clear error message otherwise.

I’ve seen this answer explaining how to check if the code is being run inside browser. However it doesn’t check if there’s NodeJS.

How do I check my JavaScript is run inside NodeJS?

Answer 1

One thing you could to is to check whether the process object is defined and whether the first element of the process.argv array is node.

Something like:

if(typeof process !== 'undefined' && process.argv[0] === "node") {
    // this is node
}

More info in the docs.