baseUrl and paths in typescript - how

Question

I've started an application in typescript. I've learned about some features of TS and it looked like something, that could help me, hovewer, I don't work like I would expect. The documentation of TS says something about Path mapping in Module resolution chapter. This module mapping can, if I understand it correctly, save me few or even lot of double-dots in import. So I have created a "inc" directory with one file (at this time), that will be included in multiple files in multiple directories. Into tsconfig I've written following:

"baseUrl": ".",
"paths": {
    "@inc/*": [ "inc/*" ]
}

Now, I would expect, that using import { X } from "@inc/somefile" (even from file resting somewhere deep in folder tree) would result in importing that export X from ./inc/somefile.ts (or .js, when runnning).

Hovewer, the compiler/transpiler will leave the import statement intact, so when I try to run this code using node.js, it will die because there is no @inc/somefile - node doesn't read tsconfig and tsc doesn't create any mapping functions.

I can, of course, read and parse the path element by hand in some kind of require wrapper, but I believe there is something I'm doing wrong and/or better way to achieve this.

Thank you for your replies.

Answer 1

Remember that

if you then try to exeute the compiled files with node (or ts-node), it will only look in the node_modules folders all the way up to the root of the filesystem and thus will not find the modules specified by paths in tsconfig. -- introduced in tsconfig-paths readme.

In conclusion, directly require tsconfig-paths into dependencies list and load tsconfig file on run could be a quick solution.