ts-node programmatic usage with require('ts-node/register')

Question

ts-node suggests to use require('ts-node/register'). And this can be seen in angular2-webpack-starter Protractor configuration.

What is require('ts-node/register') supposed to do? Does it patch require to transpile TS files, so a part of Node.js application could be written in TypeScript?

Answer 1

It does what you think it does. require('ts-node/register') is actually the same as:

require('./').register({
    lazy: true
})

See examples here: https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node/tree/master/register

The .register function registers the Typescript compiler for files with .ts and .tsx extension for compilation on the fly.