A lean Typescript setup for Node.js development

ts-setup.md

Typescript setup for Node.js development

1. Initialize the Project

First, create a new directory for your project and initialize it with npm.

mkdir my-tool
cd my-tool
npm init -y

2. Install Dependencies

npm install --save-dev typescript tsx

# More deps here
# `ofetch` for http calls, for example
npm install --save ofetch

3. Typescript config

Create a tsconfig.json file in the root of your project.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "ES2020",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "outDir": "./dist",
    "rootDir": "./src",
    "strict": true,
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true
  },
  "include": ["src"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules"]
}

4. .gitignore

Create a .gitignore file in the root of your project.

node_modules
dist

5. Start coding

Project structure:

my-tool/
├── src/
│   └── index.ts
├── package.json
├── tsconfig.json
└── .gitignore

src/index.ts

import { ofetch } from 'ofetch';

async function main() {
  console.info(await ofetch('http://dummyjson.com/test'));
}

main();

6. Setup scripts

"scripts": {
  "start": "tsx src/index.ts",
  "build": "tsc",
  "dev": "tsx watch src/index.ts"
}

7. Run

npm run dev

8. Build

npm run build

Output located in folder dist.