Creating and setting up a TypeScript project

TypeScript brings static type definitions to JavaScript. In this post I will show how to create and setup a project with TypeScript using node.js.

First you will need to install node.js in case you don't already have node.js installed. For editing TypeScript files I recommend the VS Code editor, it already has support for it without installing extra extensions.

Then to install the TypeScript compiler globally you execute the following command:

npm install -g typescript ts-node

After that you create a directory for your project, for example, my-project.

Inside this directory, to init a project run the following commands:

npm --init -y

tsc --init

Running these commands will create a package.json that you can customize and also a tsconfig.json.

Inside your project directory, create two more directories: src and build. The src directory will contain your TypeScript source files and the build directory will have the compiled JavaScript files.

Open the tsconfig.json in the editor, discomment and modify the following lines to this:

outDir: "./build"
rootDir: "./src"

Now, to automatically compile and run your project, you will need to install two more libs:

npm install nodemon --save-dev
npm install concurrently --save-dev

Nodemon watches for modified .js files and execute them automatically. Concurrently will be used to run the tsc compiler and nodemon together.

Edit your package.json adding the following to the scripts section:

"start:build": "tsc -w",
"start:run": "nodemon build/index.js",
"start": "concurrently npm:start:*"

To execute the project run npm start. In this case the entry point of your application is in src/index.ts and it will be automatically compiled to build/index.js.

And that's it. Now you can work on your TypeScript projects.