Setting Up TypeScript for Node

Today, I wanted to go over how to set up a TypeScript project for NodeJS from scratch.

It's something that I do fairly often and so it's nice to have this as a starter repo for some of my future NodeJS projects.

Let's first create a new directory for this project. I'll just call it ts-node-demo for now, but you can just rename it at a later date when you use it to start a new project.

mkdir ts-node-demo
cd ts-node-demo

Let's make this a git repository and use yarn for our package manager. It'll be a good idea not to commit any of our dependencies into our repo as well.

git init
yarn init
echo node_modules/ > .gitignore

Now I'll add the most basic dependencies for our TypeScript NodeJS project. Rather than doing an explicit build step and then running the plan JavaScript file that is a result of that build, I want to use the ts-node library that will take care of that for me. I'll, of course, also add TypeScript as well as the type definitions for NodeJS.

yarn add ts-node typescript @types/node

It'll be nice if I didn't have to restart the dev server everytime I save a file so let's add ts-node-dev. If you've ever worked with nodemon, this is pretty much the same, but for TypeScript.

yarn add -D ts-node-dev

package.json

{
  "name": "ts-node-demo",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "main": "index.js",
  "author": "Warren Wong<me@warrenwong.org>",
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "@types/node": "^12.0.4",
    "ts-node": "^8.2.0",
    "typescript": "^3.5.1"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "ts-node-dev": "^1.0.0-pre.39"
  }
}

I'll update the package.json to reflect the change to using TypeScript by changing index.js to index.ts. I should go ahead and create that file as well.

touch index.ts

Now let's add some scripts for starting the production app as well as starting the dev server. Since a service like Heroku would use yarn start or npm start to start the production server, I'll go ahead define "start" as "yarn ts-node index.ts". To start the dev server, I want to just type yarn dev, so I'll define "dev" as "yarn ts-node-dev index.ts".

package.json

{
  "name": "ts-node-demo",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "main": "index.ts",
  "author": "Warren Wong <me@warrenwong.org>",
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "ts-node": "^8.2.0",
    "typescript": "^3.5.1"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/node": "^12.0.4",
    "ts-node-dev": "^1.0.0-pre.39"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "yarn ts-node index.ts",
    "dev": "yarn ts-node-dev index.ts"
  }
}

Now to check if everything worked out, I'll need index.ts to actually do something.

index.ts

console.log("Hello, World!");

Okay, time to test this out.

yarn dev

Using ts-node version 8.2.0, typescript version 3.5.1
Hello, World!

yarn start

Hello, World!