Restartable debugging for TypeScript within Visual Studio Code (vscode) using nodemon and ts-node

README.md

Info

Inspiration was taken from Eduardo Rabelo - https://eduardorabelo.me - from this article: https://dev.to/oieduardorabelo/nodejs-with-typescript-debug-inside-vscode-and-nodemon-23o7

To start debugging, you need to first start the dev:debug npm script with npm run dev:debug, then run the Node: Nodemon launch configuration from VSCode, in order to attach the debugger to the app process.

Pick the nodemon process when prompted, the one that should look like npx nodemon --inspect src/index.ts. It's the process that stays alive and restarts the app process when you make changes (of course it first feeds the *.ts code to ts-node for transpilation because of that node --require ts-node/register line in nodemon.json).

Template

Eduardo also has a nice template for bootstrapping this setup for new Node+TypeScript projects: https://github.com/oieduardorabelo/node-typescript

launch.json

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "type": "node",
      "request": "attach",
      "name": "Node: Nodemon",
      "processId": "${command:PickProcess}",
      "restart": true,
      "protocol": "inspector"
    }
  ]
}

nodemon.json

{
  "restartable": "rs",
  "ignore": [".git", "node_modules/**/node_modules"],
  "verbose": true,
  "execMap": {
    "ts": "node --require ts-node/register"
  },
  "watch": ["src/"],
  "env": {
    "NODE_ENV": "development"
  },
  "ext": "js,json,ts"
}

package.json

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "npx nodemon src/index.ts",
    "dev:debug": "npx nodemon --inspect src/index.ts"
  }
}

tsconfig.json

{
  "version": "4.0.2",
  "compilerOptions": {
    "sourceMap": true,
    "strict": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "target": "es2019",
    "lib": ["es2019"],
    "module": "commonjs",
    "moduleResolution": "node",

    "alwaysStrict": true,
    "emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
    "pretty": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "strictNullChecks": true,

    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "noImplicitReturns": true,
    "noUnusedLocals": true,
    "noUnusedParameters": true,

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

    "typeRoots": ["./node_modules/@types", "./node_modules"],
    "types": ["node"]
  },

  "include": ["src/**/*"],
  "exclude": ["./node_modules", "**/*.test.ts"],

  "compileOnSave": true
}