Grunt still unable to handle ES6 imports?

Question

I am working on a project under NodeJS that uses ES6 imports/exports (hence having set type: module in its package.json) and want to automate some tasks using Grunt. Now, I absolutely love grunt, but it appears to me that even in 2022 it is still not able to work nicely with ES6 modules? I always get an error saying "require() of ES Module /vagrant/Gruntfile.js from /vagrant/node_modules/grunt/lib/grunt/task.js not supported."

I understand where this is coming from , and I do understand there are workaround options - in particular, renaming Gruntfile.js to Gruntfile.cjs and passing it to grunt with the --gruntfile command line option. But that is incredibly annoying - it makes the command six times as long as it would be if I could just run grunt and be done with it. Pretty much the same goes for transpiling with something like Babel: That is exactly the kind of thing grunt is intended to handle in the first place, so it feels a bit like the horse riding the jockey. I feel like this should "just work".

Am I missing something here, or is grunt really unable to handle ES6 imports out of the box?

Answer 1

Actually, looking at the grunt github page it appears that a recent commit has addressed it.

I guess this issue will therefore be resolved in their next update.