---
title: "How to use NPM packages outside of Node"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-use-npm-packages-outside-of-node-mlvc2fg42
source_url: https://neon.com/blog/using-npm-packages-outside-node
type: article
source: "Neon"
published: 2026-07-09T06:57:43.638Z
updated: 2026-07-09T07:03:55.049Z
tags: ["webdev", "javascript", "nodejs", "serverless", "npm"]
reading_time: 7
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# How to use NPM packages outside of Node

**[Neon](https://daily.dev/sources/neontech)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Many npm packages rely on Node.js-specific features like Buffer, fs, or net.Socket, making them unusable in environments like Vercel Edge Functions, Cloudflare Workers, or browsers. Using esbuild as a bundler, several techniques can solve this: installing third-party shim packages for imported or global objects, using esbuild's --inject flag to polyfill globals like Buffer, creating stub packages for non-critical Node built-ins like fs, reimplementing simple Node APIs using Web APIs (e.g., TextDecoder for StringDecoder), and package masquerading to swap one package for another in a dependency tree. These approaches are illustrated with real examples from building the @neondatabase/serverless Postgres driver, which adapts the node-postgres pg package for serverless environments.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://neon.com/blog/using-npm-packages-outside-node>

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---

Tags: [#webdev](https://daily.dev/tags/webdev), [#javascript](https://daily.dev/tags/javascript), [#nodejs](https://daily.dev/tags/nodejs), [#serverless](https://daily.dev/tags/serverless), [#npm](https://daily.dev/tags/npm)

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