mightyiam / tsconfigs

Reusable TypeScript configuration files to extend from.

⚙️ tsconfigs ✨

Reusable TypeScript configuration files

Contents

• Overview
• Project kinds
• Example
• Scope
  • Executable project options
  • Module project options
• Environment
  • Browser project options
  • Web Worker project options
  • Node.js project options
  • Agnostic project options
• Common project options
• Strictness
• Paths
• Test coverage

Overview

Say you're starting a new TypeScript project. And you're setting up the tsconfig.json. If you're a TypeScript wizard 🧙‍ you quickly fill in some options and you're done. But If you're a meer mortal like most of us, you go back to the documentation every time 🤔. After several times of that I decided to write this little project 💡.

If your project is one of the following kinds of projects, you could extend from one of them, instead of writing your own from blank. And then you could override any options necessary.

Project kinds

	Module ⚙️	Executable 🚄
Browser 🌐	browser-module	browser-executable
Web Worker ⛏️	webworker-module
Node.js ⬡	nodejs-module	nodejs-executable
Agnostic 🏳️	agnostic-module

Example

Install this package (tsconfigs) and in your tsconfig.json:

{
  "extends": "tsconfigs/nodejs-executable", // 🎆
  "compilerOptions": {
    "outDir": "lib"
  },
  "include": [
    "src/**/*"
  ]
}

Scope

Executable project options

Option	Default value	Our value	Comment
composite	true	false	It seems to have no benefit for executables and it necessitates generation of declaration files, which seem useless in executables, as well.

Module project options

Option	Default value	Our value	Comment
declaration	false	true	Because we'd like to provide the importer with type definitions.

Environment

Browser project options

Option	Default value	Our value
lib	depends	["ESNext","DOM"]
module	depends	"ESNext"

Web Worker project options

Option	Default value	Our value
lib	depends	["ESNext","WebWorker"]
module	depends	"ESNext"

Node.js project options

Option	Default value	Our value	Comment
lib	depends	["ESNext"].	You'd most likely also like to install the @types/node package.
module	depends	"CommonJS"

Agnostic project options

Option	Default value	Our value	Comment
lib	depends	["ESNext"]
module	depends	"CommonJS"	While for small packages, CommonJS could be just fine, for larger packages, where the ability to perform tree shaking is desirable, it seems that the agnostic project author should consider providing two builds. One CommonJS build and one ES modules build.

Common project options

Option	Default value	Our value	Comment
allowSyntheticDefaultImports	depends	true	Stack Overflow question
esModuleInterop	false	true	Stack Overflow question
forceConsistentCasingInFileNames	false	true	While it does not enforce case sensitivity, it at least enforces consistent casing across references.
moduleResolution	depends	"node"	The de-facto standard.
newLine	depends	"LF"	For the sake of consistent build artifacts cross-platform.
noErrorTruncation	false	true	Screenshots: false / true
resolveJsonModule	false	true	Seems like a popular feature that does not involve drawbacks.
sourceMap	false	true	We have chosen regular source maps because it seems like the simple choice that would serve most projects.
strict	false	true	See Strictness.
target	"es3"	"esnext"	Down-transpilation is outside the scope of this project. Also, consider using Babel instead of TypeScript for that.

Strictness

We presume that strict type checking is generally desirable.

New type checking features in future releases of TypeScript are, per policy, turned off by default, for backward compatibility. Effectively making new type features, opt-in.

The strict option, however, turns on a set of strict type checking options. New strict options from future TypeScript releases will be included in it, effectively making new type checking features opt-out.

tsconfigs maintains the opt-out behavior: we turn strict on and yet keep the individual type check options that it includes, off.

Paths

We would love to include some path options like include and outDir but we feel that it would not be reliable, because TypeScript resolves relative paths from the configuration file in which they appear and not from the end-configuration file. See this issue.

Test coverage

There are both unit and integration tests for each config.