tsc-util - Wraps Around tsc to Copy Declaration and JS Files

If you follow the practice of keep TypeScript source and output files in different directories (for example, the output goes to a dist folder), you might have run into the following situations:

• While you can write *.ts files for the majority of the cases, some of the scripts are better written as *.js and *.d.ts files.
• When you run tsc, you find that the *.ts files were copied, but none of the *.js and *.d.ts files are.
• You research online and found that allowJs needs to be enabled in order to also copy the *.js files.
• That works great, so you also try to enable declaration in order to copy the *.d.ts files, but immediately this caused an error says that declaration and allowUs are conflicting with each other and the issue is still open.
• After you discovered the work around, it turns out that manually written *.d.ts won't be copied.

This small utility is meant to support the development pattern of:

• Intermixing *.ts and *.d.ts / *.js pair in the source directory.
• Copy to an dist directory, with the *.d.ts and *.js copied.
• Any references to dist foldr inside the *.js files are normalized to remove dist.
• If you are using ts-node in the *.js, it's removed when copied to dist.
• If you are using source-map-support in the *.js, it's removed once copied to dist.

As the *.d.ts and *.js files are manually copied, you do not need to enable allowJs in tsconfig.

Install

npm install -g tsc-util

Usage

Just run tsc-util (in place of tsc). Note that tsc-util currently doesn't handle any parameters that tsc does, i.e. it's not a pass through, even though it calls tsc for you.

There are two main patterns:

• source-map-support pattern - use dist/ in the import/require's.
• ts-node pattern - use without dist/ in the import/require's.

source-map-support Usage Pattern

The source-map-support pattern is as follows:

• Try to include the files from the dist folder, which includes the *.d.ts, *.js, and *.js.map files.
• use source-map-support to map back to the *.ts in the root folder.

With this pattern, you'll need to first compile dist folder before doing testing, and need to check in the dist folder if you need to npm install from git (instead of npm registry). The nice part of this pattern is that you are not including TypeScript as part of the run-time.

ts-node Usage Pattern

The ts-node pattern is as follows:

• Use require('ts-node/register') in the start script.
• all of the includes are referencing outside of the dist folder, since we will be directly running via ts-node.

With this pattern, you'll need to use ts-node as part of your development process. dist doesn't need to exist first prior to development, nor does dist needs to be checked in if you are npm install from git.