typescript-starter

This is a starter repo for TypeScript, containing everything needed to write, test, and build TypeScript for a Node.js runtime. It's intended as a simple command-line playground for TypeScript.

How to use

1. npm install
2. To run tests: npm run test
3. To build and bundle: npm run build
4. To run the bundled output: node out.js

What happens when you run npm run build?

The npm run build script does two things:

1. Run tsc, transpiling all non-excluded files into JS and outputting them into the build folder
2. Run esbuild using build/index.js as the entry point and node as the target platform, bundling the result into ./out.js.

Why use esbuild?

I prefer using ES modules over CommonJS modules:

import addNumbers from "./addNumbers";

However, if I do this, any script using such an import statement will fail after transpilation. Quoting from the TypeScript docs on module resolution and extensionless relative paths

Extensionless relative paths are not supported in import paths in Node.js...

There are no plans to support extensionless relative paths in Node.js. So, in order for the import statement to work as intended after transpilation, I'd need to write:

import addNumbers from "./addNumbers.js";

This makes very little sense to me. It's a huge leak in the TypeScript abstraction. I prefer to labor under the illusion that I am not actually writing JavaScript, and I prefer not to think at all about how TypeScript gets transformed into something that will execute in the Node runtime.

To work around this, I use TypeScript with the bundler module resolution configuration, which is the only module resolution configuration that supports extensionless relative paths. Naturally, this produces a tsc build that will not run on Node without bundling. So, I picked the fastest bundler that would solve this problem.

tl;dr: the sole reason for using esbuild in this repo is to allow me to use ESM instead of CJS.

To-do list

• Add TypeScript
• Add jest
• Add esbuild
• Add eslint
• Add prettier