Server Actions Fail to Import Members from Packages in Monorepo

[john-prutton]

Summary

The issue

I have a turborepo set up with one nextjs app and a database package.

I can successfully use the database packing in server components and api routes, but when I use it in a server action there is an error. For some reason it can't seem to import anything from the database package.

Repo

liquiFruit/like-it-wear-it@feat/add-db

Successfully using the package in RSC

Here I have an RSC page that can import and use the getUsers function from the database package.

Error using the package in a server action

Here I have a client component with a onClick event handler on a button. This event handler calls a server action tryCreateUser, which in turn calls a function from the database package.

A (terrible) solution

Upon moving "use server" into the database package, the client component can directly import the function createUser from the database package and successfully invoke it.

Conclusion

This is terrible for many reasons:

1. The database package should be completely decoupled from nextjs as I will consume it from multiple apps (reactjs, nestjs, etc)
2. I can then only export async functions from the database package, whereas I need to export objects too (db, schema, etc)

Additional information

next.js: 14.0.1

Example

https://github.com/liquiFruit/like-it-wear-it/tree/feat/add-db

[Pascal-Lohscheidt]

So I still have that issue on 14.2.23. (I am using Prisma though) and its unable to find the prisma db client

And even though similar things are mentioned in other threads and they praise setting esmExternals: false. It did not work for me.

However I realised it only happens for some server actions and only to those which where on a route where the there was no layout and the page.tsx was client side or did not fetch anything from the database and did not import the database client.

I assume it might be because of what is written here

Server Actions inherit the runtime from the page or layout they are used on.

So for me making sure that the page.tsx or layout.tsx (from which I am calling the server-action) is using the database helped.

just placing that here if someone is stumbling upon that problem themself