Error starting TypeScript language service in WebStorm 2018

Question

I'm new to using WebStorm (v2018.2 on Windows 7) and trying to work with TypeScript. And I am getting following error, despite trying many combinations of the TypeScript configuration settings in WebStorm.

Error:Timeout on starting language service process

As a result, I'm unable to compile my .ts files within the IDE.

TypeScript is working fine from command line (i.e. successfully able to run tsc to compile .ts files).

I have thoroughly reviewed the WebStorm help documentation and other tutorials, but nowhere have I seen this error mentioned or how to resolve it.

Answer 1

I've encountered this error a few times myself, and in my case it seems to be a problem with the node interpreter WebStorm is trying to use.

Earlier this week something I had installed via mac's homebrew package manager added a new/broken build of node to my system as a dependency. When I started having issues with webstorm, I opened preferences > Languages & Frameworks > TypeScript and saw that the Node interpreter was set to /usr/local/bin/node instead of my usual nvm path. I opened a terminal and tried running the node executable it was pointed to, and found that it was throwing an error.

A lot of the specifics aren't really comparable to your situation since you're on Windows, but I think it's probably a similar root cause, a bad node executable is the only thing I've ever seen cause this error message.