TypeScript: Compilation
Understanding TypeScript’s “Compilation Process” & the anatomy of “tsconfig.json” file to configure TypeScript Compiler
In this lesson, we are going to learn about the settings of the TypeScript compiler and the usage of the tsconfig.json file.
TypeScript provides a command-line utility tsc that compiles (transpiles) TypeScript files (.ts) into JavaScript. However, the tsc compiler (short for TypeScript compiler) needs a JSON configuration file to look for TypeScript files in the project and generate valid output files at a correct location.
When you run tsc command in a directory, TypeScript compiler looks for the tsconfig.json file in the current directory and if it doesn’t find one, then it keeps looking up the directory tree until it finds one. The directory where the tsconfig.json is located is considered as the root of the project.
You can manually provide a path to the tsconfig.json file using --project or -p command-line flag. This file doesn’t need to have the tsconfig.json filename if you are using this flag with the exact file path. However, you can also provide the directory path that contains the tsconfig.json file.
