Help me understand imports

[mfcochauxlaberge]

I'm new to Nitro and the whole unjs ecosystem. If find it interesting enough to want to dig a little, understand how it works, write solid code with it, and maybe one day even contribute.

Lately I've had a hard time with auto imports. They worked out of the box and I was able to follow the guide and make a small app. But once I went deeper, I felt like I hit a brick wall.

See, there's no documentation at all for testing and a lot of the auto import magic isn't explained and hard to disable. From what I found online I should just build my app and run it on some random port. That would be fine for e2e tests, but I want to make small and fast little tests for each individual endpoints. I made so progress in that direction, but:

• I had to disable auto imports because I could not make them work. I'm okay with that since I don't want to use that feature, but it seems like it's hard to fully disable them.
• I had to manually read the middleware directory to build the app programmatically. Maybe there's a better way for works good enough for me.
• I found out about johannschopplich/nitro-test-utils, but I don't want to use it. I don't like committing to a framework that I can't understand, control, and debug easily. If I use this library, I'm just kicking the can down the road.

The issue I have is imports. Even when auto imports disabled, I cannot simply run a test because for some reason the test environment isn't configured with all the magic.

In general, it's hard to see how imports are managed. I guess it's all done by unimport? I wonder why endpoint.ts works but endpoint.test.ts (which imports endpoint.ts) fails miserably and complains about undefined functions in endpoint.ts.

By better understanding the setup, I want to fix the test environment myself, then share my story and help improve Nitro.

Right now with auto imports disabled, and the error I get is that the #nitro-internal-virtual/storage module cannot be found. But that module is mentioned deep down in nitropack. Why would the output of nitropack still use that magic?

My question is: how can I understand imports? Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!