6. Migrate IOC Imports

Migrate AdonisJS imports

The "migrate AdonisJS imports" patch removes the existing @ioc prefixed imports from your application source in favor of new standard ESM imports.

npx @adonisjs/upgrade-kit@latest migrate-ioc-imports

Multiple things to note :

  • This patch can be relatively slow for large codebases since it has to traverse all the files and replace the imports.
  • This patch will not update dynamic imports.

History of @ioc prefixed imports

AdonisJS uses the IoC Container to distribute pre-configured services like the router, mailer, emitter, and so on. For example, if you want an instance of the mailer, you can write the following code.

const Mail = container.make('Adonis/Addons/Mail')

Behind the scenes, we will read the config from the config/mail.ts file, create an instance of the Mailer class, and return a singleton instance.

In v5, we also decided to offer an import syntax for the container.make function call so you have a unified syntax for importing standard modules and resolving bindings from the container. Following is an example of the same.

import Mail from '@ioc:Adonis/Addons/Mail'

Behind the scenes, we use the TypeScript compiler API to rewrite the import as a function call, as shown in the first example. This approach has many drawbacks.

  • The @ioc import feels alien since it is particular to AdonisJS.
  • We must rely on the TypeScript official compiler API to rewrite the import. Hence, we cannot use faster tools like SWC or ESBuild.
  • We have to separately define the @ioc: Adonis/Addons/Mail types because the TypeScript compiler cannot resolve this module using its filesystem resolution logic.

Cut to v6. We are eliminating all this complexity and homegrown style of @ioc imports. This patch will rewrite the imports for you, so you do not have to replace them.

What imports have been written

See this file where we defined the list of imports to rewrite.

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