Introduction

Import order is the kind of thing every team argues about once and then never settles. apotheke settles it the way Prettier settled formatting: you describe the groups you want in a config file, and every file in the repo comes out the same way, forever.

It is not a replacement for Prettier. It runs inside Prettier as a preprocess plugin, so one prettier --write both organises imports and formats the code. If you would rather not involve Prettier at all, the same engine ships as a standalone CLI.

What it does

Given a file whose imports arrived in whatever order they were typed:

import { useQuery } from '@tanstack/react-query';
import { useMemo } from 'react';
import { createRoute } from '@tanstack/react-router';
import { tsr } from '../api/tsr';
import useLoggedUser from '../hooks/use-logged-user';

apotheke produces:

// React
import { useMemo } from 'react';

// Hooks
import useLoggedUser from '../hooks/use-logged-user';

// Api
import { tsr } from '../api/tsr';
import { useQuery } from '@tanstack/react-query';

// Navigation
import { createRoute } from '@tanstack/react-router';

Three things happened: imports were assigned to groups you defined, sorted alphabetically within each group, and given optional comment headers and blank line separators.

Why groups instead of a fixed order

Most import sorters ship an opinion — builtins, then external, then internal, then relative. That ordering describes where a module comes from, which is rarely what you care about when reading a file. apotheke lets you order by what a module is: React, then hooks, then data fetching, then routing.

Groups are matched in order and the first match wins, so the config reads top-to-bottom exactly as the output does.

Beyond ordering

Requirements

• Node.js 18 or later
• Prettier 3 or later, if you use the plugin (Prettier 2 lacks async preprocess; see the fallback)