tsc not creating the dist folder

Question

All is in the title, trying to compile my TypeScript project to ./bin folder, the tsc commend execute without error resulting in nothing created, can't figure out why.

my tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "allowJs": true,
    "checkJs": false,
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "lib": ["es6", "es7", "dom", "esnext"],
    "module": "commonjs",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "noEmit": true,
    "noImplicitAny": false,
    "outDir": "bin",
    "removeComments": true,
    "sourceMap": true,
    "target": "es2017",
    "rootDirs": ["src/", "config/"],
    "typeRoots": ["./node_modules/@types", "./typings"]
  },
  "include": ["src/**/*", "./typings"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules", "bin", "**/__mocks__*", "**/*.spec.**", "test", "assets"]
}

In my package.json this is my scripts to compile:

"scripts": {
    "build-ts": "tsc",
    "watch-ts": "tsc -w",
  },

the structure of my project:

rootdir
    |
    |-----src
    |      |----server.ts
    |      |----app.ts
    |-----test
    |-----node_modules
    |-----typings
    |-----config
    |-----tsconfig.json
    |-----package.json

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

The noEmit option causes TypeScript to not emit any files. You need to either remove "noEmit": true or pass --noEmit false in your build-ts script.

Bonus tip: Rename the script to prepack to have npm compile the TypeScript for you when you run npm pack or npm publish.

Answer 2

Another situation where TypeScript might not create a dist folder is when "incremental": true or "composite": true is set in compilerOptions in tsconfig.json, and you delete the dist folder without deleting the tsconfig.tsbuildinfo that keeps track of the incremental builds.

If you keep tsconfig.tsbuildinfo around and delete or modify dist, the compiler won't see a need to output anything, since tsconfig.tsbuildinfo is telling it that there's no work to do. The problem is the tsconfig.tsbuildinfo references an old state of dist.

Say your npm run clean command runs rimraf dist. You'll have to update it to also rimraf tsconfig.tsbuildinfo.