Mastering Express: Building Robust TypeScript Servers with Ease.

This article is a step by step tutorial to create a express server using typescript.

Note: Typescript cannot be run directly into node runtime environment, although runtime like Deno, Bun supports typescript.

Create a folder, initialize npm package using:

npm init --y

Let's install dependencies required to create express server.
express, @types/express to use type definitions, intellisense in code editor. Also few developer dependencies like typescript to convert typescript file into javascript file, nodemon to ease our development (it automatically watch for changes, and reload your code in runtime), concurrently to run both the above developer dependencies simultaneously.

npm i express @types/express && npm i -d nodemon concurrently

Let's initialize typescript in the project. using the following command

npx tsc --init

A tsconfig.json file will be created in the project. In the tsconfig.json file uncomment outDir line and enter a outDir (dist here):

"outDir": "./dist"

Let's create a NPM script for this typescript express configuration.

In pacakage.json file add following code,

"dev" : "concurrently \" tsc --watch\" \"nodemon dist/index.js\""

also remove a line

"main" : "index.js"

now the final part, create index.ts file.

import express from "express";
const PORT = 3000;
const app = express();
app.get("/",(req,res)=>{
  res.send("Hello");
}
app.listen(PORT);

Run the dev script you just created in command line using:

npm run dev

That's it you're good to go, your express typescript server is ready at localhost, port 3000 Link

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