Error: "No such module 'node:http'." on Cloudflare Pages

[M-erb]

First off THANK YOU to everyone who made this happen! I love apostrophe CMS and astro and to have them together is a dream come true for me. Now that I got my fan boy out of the way, onto the issue I ran into. I am trying to deploy the frontend part of my site to cloudflare pages and have run into an issue. I read in the docs here that seems to strongly suggest that this should be possible. Please let me know if I am mistaken though.

The short version is that it seems this extension is using the node API node:http which is not yet supported in cloudflare as documented here at the time I tried this. (hopefully that changes soon!) I also found that this extension uses the node API node:assert but that is supported by cloudflare so we are good there.

It builds fine in cloudflare pages, but as soon as I try to view the page in a browser I get this error in the cloudflare pages dashboard:

{
  "wallTime": 1,
  "cpuTime": 0,
  "truncated": false,
  "executionModel": "stateless",
  "outcome": "exception",
  "scriptVersion": {
    "id": "4d18c4c0-3b45-48fa-96c0-efe062ac56a9"
  },
  "scriptName": "pages-worker--5975519-production",
  "diagnosticsChannelEvents": [],
  "exceptions": [
    {
      "name": "Error",
      "message": "No such module \"node:http\".\n  imported from \"chunks/aposResponse_Dff82EGN.mjs\"",
      "timestamp": 1745367621909
    }
  ],
  "logs": [
    {
      "message": [
        "00:20:21 [ERROR] Error: No such module \"node:http\".\n  imported from \"chunks/aposResponse_Dff82EGN.mjs\""
      ],
      "level": "error",
      "timestamp": 1745367621909
    }
  ],
  // ... and so on...
}

To Reproduce

Step by step instructions to reproduce the behavior:

I created a repo similar to the Apollo example repo with the project split into folders of, backend with apostrpheCMS, and frontend with astro. Everything working great locally.

I then went through the node compatibility notes found in both astro's docs and cloudflare's. Below are some snippets from my project:

wrangler.json Added the required compatibility props in wrangler:

{
	"name": "apos-frontend",
	"compatibility_flags": ["nodejs_compat"],
	"compatibility_date": "2025-04-22",
	"pages_build_output_dir": "./dist",
	"kv_namespaces": [
		{
			"binding": "SESSION",
			"id": "...."
		}
	]
}

astro.config.mjs page attention, mostly, to the vite.ssr.external value:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config'
import tailwindcss from '@tailwindcss/vite'
import cloudflare from '@astrojs/cloudflare'
import apostrophe from '@apostrophecms/apostrophe-astro'
import { loadEnv } from 'vite'

const env = loadEnv('', process.cwd(), 'APOS')

// https://astro.build/config
export default defineConfig({
	output: 'server',
	adapter: cloudflare({
		imageService: 'passthrough',
		platformProxy: {
			enabled: true,
			configPath: 'wrangler.json'
		}
	}),
	integrations: [
		apostrophe({
			aposHost: 'http://localhost:3000',
			widgetsMapping: './src/widgets',
			templatesMapping: './src/templates',
			includeResponseHeaders: [
				'content-security-policy',
				'strict-transport-security',
				'x-frame-options',
				'referrer-policy',
				'cache-control'
			],
			excludeRequestHeaders: [
				// For hosting on multiple servers, block the host header
				'host'
			]
		})
	],
	vite: {
		plugins: [tailwindcss()],
		ssr: {
			// Do not externalize the @apostrophecms/apostrophe-astro plugin, we need
			// to be able to use virtual: URLs there
			noExternal: ['@apostrophecms/apostrophe-astro'],
			external: ['node:assert', 'node:http'] // <------- astro says we also need to add the specific node APIs here for them to be added to the final build in cloudflare.
		},
		define: {
			'process.env.APOS_EXTERNAL_FRONT_KEY': JSON.stringify(env.APOS_EXTERNAL_FRONT_KEY),
			'process.env.APOS_HOST': JSON.stringify(env.APOS_HOST)
		}
	}
})

Expected behavior

I expected this to run and render in the cloudflare pages environment based on it being mentioned in the documentation as a place the astro frontend could be deployed to.

Describe the bug

It seems this extension is requiring a node API node:http that is not yet supported on the cloudflare pages platform.

Details

Version of Node.js:
PLEASE NOTE: Only stable LTS versions (10.x and 12.x) are fully supported but we will do our best with newer versions.

22.11.0

Server Operating System:
The server (which might be your dev laptop) on which Apostrophe is running. Linux? MacOS X? Windows? Is Docker involved?

Frontend: Cloudflare Pages
Backend: ApostropheCMS is running on linux with Docker using Coolify to manage it. (but that part is not the problem here)

Additional context:

Add any other context about the problem here. If the problem is specific to a browser, OS or mobile device, specify which.

I made sure to set the "build configuration" settings in cloudflare as follows:
build command: npm run build
build output directory: /dist
root directory path: /frontend

Tried it on Firefox and Chrome, but the above error message came from the cloudflare log stream. https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/functions/debugging-and-logging/#view-logs-in-the-cloudflare-dashboard.

Let me know if there are any questions! Sorry if I missed anything. Thank you so much!

[BoDonkey]

Hi @M-erb - Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I changed my GH contact email and now the alerts I get are spotty.
Anyway - on to the problem! The wrangler solution is going to help at build time, but it isn't going to help at runtime. I'm not sure if we would ever switch from using the node:http to fetch directly. One possibility is that we write a polyfill that maps the node requests to fetch, but the one issue come about from request being stream based and fetch being promise.

EDIT: Looking at the code, we are using undici, which is pretty close to a polyfill itself for using fetch with node:http. A poly fill might be quite easy. I don't have the time at the moment to do a cloudflare test, but it could be something simple like:

// undici-polyfill.js
export async function request(url, options) {
  const response = await fetch(url, options);
  
  // Mimic undici's response format
  return {
    statusCode: response.status,
    headers: Object.fromEntries(response.headers.entries()),
    body: {
      json: () => response.json(),
      text: () => response.text(),
      arrayBuffer: () => response.arrayBuffer()
    }
  };
}

And then bringing the polyfill into the vite.resolve.alias of your astro config.
If you (or someone else) ends up trying this approach, please report back whether it works!
The main unknowns are:

• Whether all undici response methods are covered
• How error handling behaves in the Cloudflare runtime

Again, sorry for the delay and good luck!
Bob