Switch to fetch for url requests

[danielholmes]

What's Changing and Why

Core/request is the last source file using commonJS exports. It's not a simple syntax change though since it uses a feature of CJS not available in ESM - conditional exports. Specifically, if in a browser or electron environment then the global XMLHttpRequest is being used, but in a node environment the node only package phin is being used.

This is one of the hard blockers for ESM based tool compatibility (e.g. vite and rollup). See my example repo for a playground trying to get this working.

NodeJS has fetch built in from v18 onwards and browser compatibility for fetch is now very high. I propose a move to fetch instead of the conditional requires.

I went back and forth about whether to use fetch and rely on the library users to install a polyfill if needed or to include a polyfill within jimp. Without the polyfill I think a lot of projects will break and I think that should maybe be done in a "big" release (like 1.0), but let me know what you think.

What else might be affected

loadFromURL can take a set of options. When in the node environment all those options are passed to phin. Any options used to pass to phin that are not supported by the fetch API will stop working.

Tasks

• Add tests
• Update Documentation
• Update jimp.d.ts
• Add SemVer Label

Release Notes

The underlying library for fetching images has been changed.

loadFromURL can take a set of options. When in the node environment all those options are passed to phin. Any options used to pass to phin that are not supported by the fetch API will stop working.

[github-actions]

🚀 PR was released in v0.22.0 🚀