i18next: Mismatch between TypeScript types and CommonJS export

After disabling an ESLint rule that was causing me trouble, I ran into a new issue trying to incorporate i18next into my project.

I’m writing code for a back-end NodeJS server that is compiled with TypeScript. Therefore the import syntax is handled not by Babel, but by TypeScript - and gets translated as such:

import i18next from "i18next";

// Becomes:

const i18next_1 = require("i18next").default;

This output JavaScript is then run in NodeJS like normal, relying on the main key in the package.json to locate the module. Thus it loads ./dist/cjs/i18next.js, which exports like so:

//...

var i18next = new I18n();

module.exports = i18next;

As you can see, there’s no export called “default”. Therefore what I really need is to import the module.exports under the name i18next. This can be done in TypeScript:

import * as i18next from "i18next";

However when I do this, I start getting errors whenever I try to use it:

Worse yet, since these are TypeScript errors and not ESLint errors, I can’t just hand-wave them or disable them. Attempting to run tsc against my code stops compilation early with the error:

stevenbarnett@MacBook-Pro bf-hapijs-plugin % npx tsc
src/i18n/index.ts:33:35 - error TS2339: Property 'init' does not exist on type 'typeof import("/Users/stevenbarnett/Repos/pangolin-jerky/bf-hapijs-plugin/node_modules/i18next/index")'.

33      const translate = await i18next.init({
                                        ~~~~


Found 1 error.

For the record, if I don’t try to import i18next this way (using import * as ...) then the following happens:

import i18next from "i18next";

console.log(i18next); // -> undefined

i18next.init(); // -> crashes with error "Cannot read property 'init' of undefined"