Question

What I want

Is it possible to pass locals to a required module?
For example:

// in main.js
var words = { a: 'hello', b:'world'};
require('module.js', words);

// in module.js
console.log(words.a + ' ' + words.b) // --> Hello World

I’m asking this because in PHP when you require or include, the file which includes another files inherits it’s variables, which is very useful in some cases, and I would be happy if this could be done in node.js too.

What I have tried and didn’t worked

 var words = { a: 'hello', b:'world'};
 require('module.js', words);

---

 var words = { a: 'hello', b:'world'};
 require('module.js');

Both of these gives ReferenceError: words is not defined when words is called in module.js

So is it possible at all without global variables?

Answer 1

What you want to do is export it with an argument so you can pass it the variable.

module.js

module.exports = function(words){
    console.log(words.a + ' ' + words.b);
};

main.js

var words = { a: 'hello', b:'world'};
// Pass the words object to module
require('module')(words);

You can also chop off the .js in the require 🙂