use c12 in production (netlify)

[ayoayco]

Environment

Nitro: 2.10.4 (latest)
Node: 22.12.0

Reproduction

Repo: https://github.com/ayoayco/nitro-c12-netlify-reproduction
StackBlitz: https://stackblitz.com/edit/github-aluadpqs?file=nitro.config.ts
Netlify Build: https://app.netlify.com/sites/lively-sunflower-e3c342/deploys/67817d1b9227bb0008480b85

Describe the bug

I am using c12 loadConfig from inside a nitro middleware and it is working okay both on dev and default node-server presets; however when deployed to netlify it is not getting the configuration.

My hunch is that the config file is not in the netlify build. Apologies if this is not a bug and documented somewhere, I couldn't find how to work it out.

I'm willing to work on an improvement/fix/doc for this if someone can point to a good direction

Screenshots

node-server build

dev server

netlify (prod) function

Logs

No response

[pi0]

Hi. Thanks for the reproduction. c12 is a build-time dependency while server handlers (routes and middleware are part of runtime) so generally it is really not the right usage of c12.

I would suggest you to read the any config (via c12 or other means) using a nitro module build-time and pass it as runtime-config that will get bundled.

But on why it wouldn't work in production, please note that c12 default loads from the current working directory. A netlify deployment CWD is not not/ does not include the whole git repository, but only build-output dir.

[ayoayco]

Thanks @pi0 -- this is very clear, and confirms my observation as well 👍🏼

[ayoayco]

Oh, I would like to add I cannot use the Nitro's runtimeConfig in my real project because I need to pass functions, which are not serializable by default. Will see if I find a solution and put here. Open for more ideas 🙇‍♂️

[pi0]

You need to use let bundler do the job then (using dynamic import to the path of config files)

Nitro v2 has appConfig support that does same effect but we drop it for v3 since you can already do it.