Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'define' on 'CustomElementRegistry': this name has already been used with this registry

Question

Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'define' on 'CustomElementRegistry': this name has already been used with this registry at http://127.0.0.1:8000/components/@polymer/polymer/lib/elements/dom-module.js:175:16

Tried deleting node-modules and package-lock and reinstalling did not work.

Answer 1

this error is due to a custom element tag-name being registered which is already registered; to fix simply check that an element by this name hasn't already been registered. This example solution checks to see if something is already registered using the existing API and if not, registers the given Class (inheriting from/extending HTMLElement--at some point):

customElements.get('the-element') || customElements.define('the-element', HTMLTheElement);

For more on the API see https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/CustomElementRegistry

most/mature libraries address this problem and those that don't, or are mangled by package and build process complexities can have it pop up; in most cases either updating to a current version, migrating to Lit (https://lit.dev) or patching the problem somehow provides a path to a solution; note the simpler solutions are far easier to maintain--as can be seen in the conflation of npm, polymer over the actual error in the original question; the Polymer project became lit-html and LitElement, and recently rebranded as "Lit" (and still includes these lit-things). Professionally I'm migrating away from npm and Nodejs to Deno with the aim of generally resolve the many problems related to npm and tooling insecurity and complexity, however this answer provides a more direct solution (understand the problem and fix directly, or update to the relevant latest solution which includes this somehow).

Answer 2

Well, this worked for me, with no Typescript warnings,

if (!customElements.get('the-element')) { customElements.define('the-element', HTMLTheElement); }

Hope someone will find this useful.

Cheers.

Answer 3

It is unwise to use the answers above. You want it to fail! The reason being is that your NPM should be deduping duplicate packages, so the fact that you see a certain component being defined on the custom elements registry more than once is a crucial error that you need to debug why the same component is registered more than once.

How to debug, in short, go to your browser, inspect element, network tab, refresh, figure out which files are both registering the same element. Then check in the initiator to see which files are loading those files. Then you get a way better idea of why your app is not resolving the same import to a single place (your deduped dependency).

One reason why you might face this problem is due to semver. If you have multiple different major versions of the same dependency, NPM cannot just dedupe all of the installations to your root node_modules. How you solve this is up to you. Some people use npm-aliases for their different majors of a dependency, some people implement a plugin in their build-tool to resolve paths to a single installation, etc.

Answer 4

For people that can't use @jimmonts answer because the issue is in one of their dependencies you can use the following snippet:

This happens for us, because a package we are using defines an element. But this package is used by multiple apps. And these apps, wouldn't you know it, interact. So customElements.define('x-tag', className) gets called multiple times. And the second time it does, it crashes the app.

function safeDecorator(fn) {
  // eslint-disable-next-line func-names
  return function(...args) {
    try {
      return fn.apply(this, args);
    } catch (error) {
      if (
        error instanceof DOMException &&
        error.message.includes('has already been used with this registry')
      ) {
        return false;
      }
      throw error;
    }
  };
}

customElements.define = safeDecorator(customElements.define);

Answer 5

I was getting the same error. You may not have the same issue as me but I thought I would drop my solution here just incase someone runs into the same issue in the future.

I had two modules that both imported the same custom element module, one of the was importing Module.js and the other module.js. Now the browser saw this as two separate files because URLs can be case sensitive, except my server saw this as one file because it is not case sensitive (express.js) or at least it was able to resolve the path to the correct file even with the incorrect case. And so the browser saw two "different" modules both defining the same custom element, but when I searched my source code only one file was defining the custom element.