Write and run node.js application in Typescript

Question

I searched for this a day now and hope you can help me.

I really like developing JS Applications in TypeScript and I am trying to write my new node application that way. Unfortunately node does not understand TS. Is there a way (besides transpiling to ES5) to start my code directly from the TS file?

In the sad case there is no way to do that, what is the best practice? Writing the app in src/ts/app.ts, transpile it to src/js/app.js and reference this file in the package.json?

Answer 1

Exactly. Simply run tsc before starting your node application. You typically do that by having something like this in your package.json

{ ...
"main": "src/js/app.js",
"scripts": {
    "run": "tsc && node src/js/app.js"
}, ... }

For your further reference, there is a node sample from the official Typescript repositories available here.