Setting Up a Basic Typescript Environment

In this blog post we are going to cover a basic setup for working with Typescript and Typings in a Node environment. This is the starting point of many other post on this blog.

Setting Up the Environment

The first step in the process is to create a working directory. We are going to use the generic name “project-name” but feel free to use a more meaningful name for your own project.

$ mkdir project-name
$ cd project-name

The next step is to create a “package.json” file and install our main dependencies, “typescript” and “typings”.

$ npm init -f
$ npm install typescript typings --save

We can now add our own commands to “package.json” to work with the local version of the libraries just installed.

{
  "name": "project-name",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "tsc": "tsc",
    "tsc:init": "tsc --init",
    "tsc:watch": "tsc -w",
    "typings": "typings",
    "typings:install": "typings install",
    "postinstall": "typings install"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "typescript": "^1.8.10",
    "typings": "^1.3.0"
  }
}

We also need to create the file “tsconfig.json” to instruct typescript how to compile our files using one of our custom commands.

$ npm run tsc:init

Finally, because we are going to be using the latest javascript features in our code, we need to install the typescript definitions for ES6.

$ npm run typings:install -- dt~core-js --save --global

We are ready now to start creating typescript files. To compile our typescript files on the fly, we can use one of our custom commands.

$ npm run tsc:watch

Now, every time a new typescript file is created or updated, the compiler will do its work and create the corresponding javascript file automatically.

The source code for this setup can be found here.