Typescript - Importing Express not working

Question

I have this in my app with the @types/express dependency installed

import express = require('express');

It is pointing to the express and saying this is an unexpected identifier when I run my server. I believe this is correct TS syntax and the regular JS way of const express = .. has the same error.

Do I need regular express? or wouldn't I need the one I already installed, which should be for TS specifically?

Answer 1

The syntax you want will be

import express from "express";

and it shouldn't result in a duplicate identifier error unless its simply a IDE bug. You can look into a common setup most people use to work with NodeJS/Typescript here.

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript-Node-Starter

Answer 2

To replace require statement with import statement, for example:

    const express = require('express');

You can convert it to this:

    import * as express from "express";

And yes, you need both, regular express as dependency and @types/express as dev-dependency to have TypeScript type definitions working.