Intellij can't find tsconfig.json

Question

I'm having an issue with Intellij not being able to find my tsconfig.json file. My folder structure is this:

/ui
  /src (all typescript files in here)
  tsconfig.json

In my tsconfig.json file I have:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "outDir": "build/dist",
    "module": "esnext",
    "target": "es5",
    "lib": ["es7", "dom"],
    "sourceMap": true,
    "allowJs": true,
    "jsx": "react",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "rootDir": "src",
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "noImplicitReturns": true,
    "noImplicitThis": true,
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "strictNullChecks": false,
    "suppressImplicitAnyIndexErrors": true,
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
    "types": [
      "node",
      "webpack-env"
    ]
  },
  "exclude": [
    "node_modules",
    "build",
    "scripts",
    "acceptance-tests",
    "webpack",
    "jest"
  ],
  "include": [
    "src/**/*"
  ]
}

Intellij knows how to navigate from "src" to my src folder with command + B (go to declaration). If I close Intellij and reopen it and click "compile all" in Typescript it even compiles everything to Javascript. Then it reports the error Error: Cannot find parent 'tsconfig.json'. It still compiles to Typescript after that sometimes, but never when I click "compile all".

Is this an Intellij bug? It seems like one. I just upgraded to Intellij 2017.3, although I'm not sure if I was having this issue before.

Typescript version is 2.6.2, but I had the same issue when using 2.5.3.

Answer 1

I just had the same problem. I worked around it by explicitly setting the path to the tsconfig.json in the Settings under Typescript (there is an Options input field):

-p ./tsconfig.json

Where ./ is the root directory in my project. It probably is different in your case, like probably

-p ./ui/tsconfig.json