Minified forge does not require node crypto

[mattnotmitt]

I'm not sure what the issue is but from inspecting the minified JS for forge, it does not run the require('crypto') even if forge determines the environment is Node.

[davidlehn]

The minified code is meant to be used in a browser. When using Node.js you should use require('node-forge') and it should do the right thing. Why were you using the minified code in Node.js?

The node/browser switching code is rather ancient. It predates all modern tools. When the code gets a major refactor it's likely newer constructs will be used. It's a bit tricky in the case of crypto and this library as this is a crypto library. In theory pieces of crypto could be written with forge and vice versa. Same with WebCrypto in the browser. I'm not sure what the latest webpack conversion did to the node/browser switch paths, but it may have partly optimized out something expecting the browser path?

[mattnotmitt]

We use minified forge for crypto in https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef which is a webapp but for unit testing we use a node environment so tests for individual operations which rely on minified forge don't work.

[oxygen]

There are legitimate use cases where code is at least bundled as a single file (usually using webpack and maybe even babel) in nodejs, such as more easily distributing code - many times by including a single output js file in a nexe build.