TypeScript loader for webpack

This is the typescript loader for webpack.

Getting Started

Examples

We have a number of example setups to accomodate different workflows. Our examples can be found here.

We probably have more examples than we need. That said, here’s a good way to get started:

I want the simplest setup going. Use “vanilla” ts-loader
I want the fastest compilation that’s available. Use fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. It performs type checking in a separate process with ts-loader just handling transpilation.

Faster Builds

As your project becomes bigger, compilation time increases linearly. It’s because typescript’s semantic checker has to inspect all files on every rebuild. The simple solution is to disable it by using the transpileOnly: true option, but doing so leaves you without type checking and will not output declaration files.

You probably don’t want to give up type checking; that’s rather the point of TypeScript. So what you can do is use the fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. It runs the type checker on a separate process, so your build remains fast thanks to transpileOnly: true but you still have the type checking. Also, the plugin has several optimizations to make incremental type checking faster (AST cache, multiple workers).

If you’d like to see a simple setup take a look at our simple example. For a more complex setup take a look at our more involved example.

Yarn Plug’n’Play

ts-loader supports Yarn Plug’n’Play. The recommended way to integrate is using the pnp-webpack-plugin.

Babel

ts-loader works very well in combination with babel and babel-loader. There is an example of this in the official TypeScript Samples. Alternatively take a look at our own example.

Parallelising Builds

It’s possible to parallelise your builds. Historically this was useful from a performance perspective with webpack 2 / 3. With webpack 4+ there appears to be significantly less benefit and perhaps even cost.

But if that’s what you want to do, there’s two ways to achieve this: happypack and thread-loader. Both should be used in combination with fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin for typechecking.)

To read more, look at this post by @johnny_reilly on the webpack publication channel.

If you’d like find out further ways to improve your build using the watch API then take a look at this post by @kenneth_chau.

Installation

yarn add ts-loader --dev

npm install ts-loader --save-dev

You will also need to install TypeScript if you have not already.

yarn add typescript --dev

npm install typescript --save-dev

Running

Use webpack like normal, including webpack --watch and webpack-dev-server, or through another build system using the Node.js API.

Compatibility

TypeScript: 2.4.1+
webpack: 4.x+ (please use ts-loader 3.x if you need webpack 2 or 3 support)
node: 6.11.5 minimum (aligned with webpack 4)

A full test suite runs each night (and on each pull request). It runs both on Linux and Windows, testing ts-loader against major releases of TypeScript. The test suite also runs against TypeScript@next (because we want to use it as much as you do).

If you become aware of issues not caught by the test suite then please let us know. Better yet, write a test and submit it in a PR!

Configuration

Create or update webpack.config.js like so:

   module.exports = {
     mode: "development",
     devtool: "inline-source-map",
     entry: "./app.ts",
     output: {
       filename: "bundle.js"
     },
     resolve: {
       // Add `.ts` and `.tsx` as a resolvable extension.
       extensions: [".ts", ".tsx", ".js"]
     },
     module: {
       rules: [
         // all files with a `.ts` or `.tsx` extension will be handled by `ts-loader`
         { test: /\.tsx?$/, loader: "ts-loader" }
       ]
     }
   };

Add a tsconfig.json file. (The one below is super simple; but you can tweak this to your hearts desire)

   {
     "compilerOptions": {
       "sourceMap": true
     }
   }

The tsconfig.json file controls TypeScript-related options so that your IDE, the tsc command, and this loader all share the same options.

`devtool` / sourcemaps

If you want to be able to debug your original source then you can thanks to the magic of sourcemaps. There are 2 steps to getting this set up with ts-loader and webpack.

First, for ts-loader to produce sourcemaps, you will need to set the tsconfig.json option as "sourceMap": true.

Second, you need to set the devtool option in your webpack.config.js to support the type of sourcemaps you want. To make your choice have a read of the devtool webpack docs. You may be somewhat daunted by the choice available. You may also want to vary the sourcemap strategy depending on your build environment. Here are some example strategies for different environments:

devtool: 'inline-source-map' - Solid sourcemap support; the best “all-rounder”. Works well with karma-webpack (not all strategies do)
devtool: 'cheap-module-eval-source-map' - Best support for sourcemaps whilst debugging.
devtool: 'source-map' - Approach that plays well with UglifyJsPlugin; typically you might use this in Production

Code Splitting and Loading Other Resources

Loading css and other resources is possible but you will need to make sure that you have defined the require function in a declaration file.

declare var require: {
  <T>(path: string): T;
  (paths: string[], callback: (...modules: any[]) => void): void;
  ensure: (
    paths: string[],
    callback: (require: <T>(path: string) => T) => void
  ) => void;
};

Then you can simply require assets or chunks per the webpack documentation.

require("!style!css!./style.css");

The same basic process is required for code splitting. In this case, you import modules you need but you don’t directly use them. Instead you require them at split points. See this example and this example for more details.

TypeScript 2.4 provides support for ECMAScript’s new import() calls. These calls import a module and return a promise to that module. This is also supported in webpack - details on usage can be found here. Happy code splitting!

Declarations (.d.ts)

To output a built .d.ts file, you can set "declaration": true in your tsconfig, and use the DeclarationBundlerPlugin in your webpack config.

Failing the build on TypeScript compilation error

The build should fail on TypeScript compilation errors as of webpack 2. If for some reason it does not, you can use the webpack-fail-plugin.

For more background have a read of this issue.

`baseUrl` / `paths` module resolution

If you want to resolve modules according to baseUrl and paths in your tsconfig.json then you can use the tsconfig-paths-webpack-plugin package. For details about this functionality, see the module resolution documentation.

This feature requires webpack 2.1+ and TypeScript 2.0+. Use the config below or check the package for more information on usage.

const TsconfigPathsPlugin = require('tsconfig-paths-webpack-plugin');

module.exports = {
  ...
  resolve: {
    plugins: [new TsconfigPathsPlugin({ /*configFile: "./path/to/tsconfig.json" */ })]
  }
  ...
}

Options

There are two types of options: TypeScript options (aka “compiler options”) and loader options. TypeScript options should be set using a tsconfig.json file. Loader options can be specified through the options property in the webpack configuration:

module.exports = {
  ...
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.tsx?$/,
        use: [
          {
            loader: 'ts-loader',
            options: {
              transpileOnly: true
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Loader Options

transpileOnly (boolean) (default=false)

If you want to speed up compilation significantly you can set this flag. However, many of the benefits you get from static type checking between different dependencies in your application will be lost.

It’s advisable to use transpileOnly alongside the fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin to get full type checking again. To see what this looks like in practice then either take a look at our simple example. For a more complex setup take a look at our more involved example.

If you enable this option, webpack 4 will give you “export not found” warnings any time you re-export a type:

WARNING in ./src/bar.ts
1:0-34 "export 'IFoo' was not found in './foo'
 @ ./src/bar.ts
 @ ./src/index.ts

The reason this happens is that when typescript doesn’t do a full type check, it does not have enough information to determine whether an imported name is a type or not, so when the name is then exported, typescript has no choice but to emit the export. Fortunately, the extraneous export should not be harmful, so you can just suppress these warnings:

module.exports = {
  ...
  stats: {
    warningsFilter: /export .* was not found in/
  }
}

happyPackMode (boolean) (default=false)

If you’re using HappyPack or thread-loader to parallise your builds then you’ll need to set this to true. This implicitly sets *transpileOnly* to true and WARNING! stops registering all errors to webpack.

It’s advisable to use this with the fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin to get full type checking again. To see what this looks like in practice then either take a look at our simple HappyPack example / our simple thread-loader example. For a more complex setup take a look at our more involved HappyPack example / more involved thread-loader example. IMPORTANT: If you are using fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin alongside HappyPack or thread-loader then ensure you set the checkSyntacticErrors option like so:

        new ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin({ checkSyntacticErrors: true })

This will ensure that the plugin checks for both syntactic errors (eg const array = [{} {}];) and semantic errors (eg const x: number = '1';). By default the plugin only checks for semantic errors (as when used with ts-loader in transpileOnly mode, ts-loader will still report syntactic errors).

Also, if you are using thread-loader in watch mode, remember to set poolTimeout: Infinity so workers don’t die.

resolveModuleName and resolveTypeReferenceDirective:

These options should be functions which will be used to resolve the import statements and the <reference types="..."> directives instead of the default TypeScript implementation. It’s not intended that these will typically be used by a user of ts-loader - they exist to facilitate functionality such as Yarn Plug’n’Play.

getCustomTransformers ( (program: Program) => { before?: TransformerFactory[]; after?: TransformerFactory[]; } )

Provide custom transformers - only compatible with TypeScript 2.3+ (and 2.4 if using transpileOnly mode). For example usage take a look at typescript-plugin-styled-components or our test.

You can also pass a path string to locate a js module file which exports the function described above, this useful especially in happyPackMode. (Because forked processes cannot serialize functions see more at related issue)

logInfoToStdOut (boolean) (default=false)

This is important if you read from stdout or stderr and for proper error handling. The default value ensures that you can read from stdout e.g. via pipes or you use webpack -j to generate json output.

logLevel (string) (default=warn)

Can be info, warn or error which limits the log output to the specified log level. Beware of the fact that errors are written to stderr and everything else is written to stderr (or stdout if logInfoToStdOut is true).

silent (boolean) (default=false)

If true, no console.log messages will be emitted. Note that most error messages are emitted via webpack which is not affected by this flag.

ignoreDiagnostics (number[]) (default=[])

You can squelch certain TypeScript errors by specifying an array of diagnostic codes to ignore.

reportFiles (string[]) (default=[])

Only report errors on files matching these glob patterns.

  // in webpack.config.js
  {
    test: /\.ts$/,
    loader: 'ts-loader',
    options: { reportFiles: ['src/**/*.{ts,tsx}', '!src/skip.ts'] }
  }

This can be useful when certain types definitions have errors that are not fatal to your application.

compiler (string) (default=‘typescript’)

Allows use of TypeScript compilers other than the official one. Should be set to the NPM name of the compiler, eg ntypescript.

configFile (string) (default=‘tsconfig.json’)

Allows you to specify where to find the TypeScript configuration file.

You may provide

just a file name. The loader then will search for the config file of each entry point in the respective entry point’s containing folder. If a config file cannot be found there, it will travel up the parent directory chain and look for the config file in those folders.
a relative path to the configuration file. It will be resolved relative to the respective .ts entry file.
an absolute path to the configuration file.

Please note, that if the configuration file is outside of your project directory, you might need to set the context option to avoid TypeScript issues (like TS18003). In this case the configFile should point to the tsconfig.json and context to the project root.

colors (boolean) (default=true)

If false, disables built-in colors in logger messages.

errorFormatter ((message: ErrorInfo, colors: boolean) => string) (default=undefined)

By default ts-loader formats TypeScript compiler output for an error or a warning in the style:

[tsl] ERROR in myFile.ts(3,14)
      TS4711: you did something very wrong

If that format is not to your taste you can supply your own formatter using the errorFormatter option. Below is a template for a custom error formatter. Please note that the colors parameter is an instance of chalk which you can use to color your output. (This instance will respect the colors option.)

function customErrorFormatter(error, colors) {
  const messageColor =
    error.severity === "warning" ? colors.bold.yellow : colors.bold.red;
  return (
    "Does not compute.... " +
    messageColor(Object.keys(error).map(key => `${key}: ${error[key]}`))
  );
}

If the above formatter received an error like this:

{
  "code":2307,
  "severity": "error",
  "content": "Cannot find module 'components/myComponent2'.",
  "file":"/.test/errorFormatter/app.ts",
  "line":2,
  "character":31
}

It would produce an error message that said:

Does not compute.... code: 2307,severity: error,content: Cannot find module 'components/myComponent2'.,file: /.test/errorFormatter/app.ts,line: 2,character: 31

And the bit after “Does not compute…. ” would be red.

compilerOptions (object) (default={})

Allows overriding TypeScript options. Should be specified in the same format as you would do for the compilerOptions property in tsconfig.json.

instance (string)

Advanced option to force files to go through different instances of the TypeScript compiler. Can be used to force segregation between different parts of your code.

appendTsSuffixTo (RegExp[]) (default=[])

appendTsxSuffixTo (RegExp[]) (default=[])

A list of regular expressions to be matched against filename. If filename matches one of the regular expressions, a .ts or .tsx suffix will be appended to that filename.

This is useful for *.vue file format for now. (Probably will benefit from the new single file format in the future.)

Example:

webpack.config.js:

module.exports = {
  entry: "./index.vue",
  output: { filename: "bundle.js" },
  resolve: {
    extensions: [".ts", ".vue"]
  },
  module: {
    rules: [
      { test: /\.vue$/, loader: "vue-loader" },
      {
        test: /\.ts$/,
        loader: "ts-loader",
        options: { appendTsSuffixTo: [/\.vue$/] }
      }
    ]
  }
};

index.vue

<template><p>hello {{msg}}</p></template>
<script lang="ts">
export default {
  data(): Object {
    return {
      msg: "world"
    };
  }
};
</script>

We can handle .tsx by quite similar way:

webpack.config.js:

module.exports = {
    entry: './index.vue',
    output: { filename: 'bundle.js' },
    resolve: {
        extensions: ['.ts', '.tsx', '.vue', '.vuex']
    },
    module: {
        rules: [
            { test: /\.vue$/, loader: 'vue-loader',
              options: {
                loaders: {
                  ts: 'ts-loader',
                  tsx: 'babel-loader!ts-loader',
                }
              }
            },
            { test: /\.ts$/, loader: 'ts-loader', options: { appendTsSuffixTo: [/TS\.vue$/] } }
            { test: /\.tsx$/, loader: 'babel-loader!ts-loader', options: { appendTsxSuffixTo: [/TSX\.vue$/] } }
        ]
    }
}

tsconfig.json (set jsx option to preserve to let babel handle jsx)

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "jsx": "preserve"
  }
}

index.vue

<script lang="tsx">
export default {
  functional: true,
  render(h, c) {
    return (<div>Content</div>);
  }
}
</script>

Or if you want to use only tsx, just use the appendTsxSuffixTo option only:

            { test: /\.ts$/, loader: 'ts-loader' }
            { test: /\.tsx$/, loader: 'babel-loader!ts-loader', options: { appendTsxSuffixTo: [/\.vue$/] } }

onlyCompileBundledFiles (boolean) (default=false)

The default behavior of ts-loader is to act as a drop-in replacement for the tsc command, so it respects the include, files, and exclude options in your tsconfig.json, loading any files specified by those options. The onlyCompileBundledFiles option modifies this behavior, loading only those files that are actually bundled by webpack, as well as any .d.ts files included by the tsconfig.json settings. .d.ts files are still included because they may be needed for compilation without being explicitly imported, and therefore not picked up by webpack.

allowTsInNodeModules (boolean) (default=false)

By default, ts-loader will not compile .ts files in node_modules. You should not need to recompile .ts files there, but if you really want to, use this option. Note that this option acts as a whitelist - any modules you desire to import must be included in the "files" or "include" block of your project’s tsconfig.json.

See: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/12358

  // in webpack.config.js
  {
    test: /\.ts$/,
    loader: 'ts-loader',
    options: { allowTsInNodeModules: true }
  }

And in your tsconfig.json:

  {
    "include": [
      "node_modules/whitelisted_module.ts"
    ],
    "files": [
      "node_modules/my_module/whitelisted_file.ts"
    ]
  }

context (string) (default=undefined)

If set, will parse the TypeScript configuration file with given absolute path as base path. Per default the directory of the configuration file is used as base path. Relative paths in the configuration file are resolved with respect to the base path when parsed. Option context allows to set option configFile to a path other than the project root (e.g. a NPM package), while the base path for ts-loader can remain the project root.

Keep in mind that not having a tsconfig.json in your project root can cause different behaviour between ts-loader and tsc. When using editors like VS Code it is advised to add a tsconfig.json file to the root of the project and extend the config file referenced in option configFile. For more information please read the PR that is the base and read the PR that contributed this option.

webpack:

{
  loader: require.resolve('ts-loader'),
  options: {
    context: __dirname,
    configFile: require.resolve('ts-config-react-app')
  }
}

Extending tsconfig.json:

{ "extends": "./node_modules/ts-config-react-app/index" }

Note that changes in the extending file while not be respected by ts-loader. Its purpose is to satisfy the code editor.

experimentalFileCaching (boolean) (default=true)

By default whenever the TypeScript compiler needs to check that a file/directory exists or resolve symlinks it makes syscalls. It does not cache the result of these operations and this may result in many syscalls with the same arguments (see comment with example). In some cases it may produce performance degradation.

This flag enables caching for some FS-functions like fileExists, realpath and directoryExists for TypeScript compiler. Note that caches are cleared between compilations.

projectReferences (boolean) (default=false)

TL;DR: Using project references currently requires building referenced projects outside of ts-loader. We don’t want to keep it that way, but we’re releasing what we’ve got now. To try it out, you’ll need to pass projectReferences: true to loaderOptions. You’ll also probably need to use TypeScript 3.1.1 or later (which, as of this writing, means typescript@next).

ts-loader has partial support for project references in that it will load dependent composite projects that are already built, but will not currently build/rebuild those upstream projects. The best way to explain exactly what this means is through an example. Say you have a project with a project reference pointing to the lib/ directory:

tsconfig.json
app.ts
lib/
  tsconfig.json
  niftyUtil.ts

And we’ll assume that the root tsconfig.json has { "references": { "path": "lib" } }, which means that any import of a file that’s part of the lib sub-project is treated as a reference to another project, not just a reference to a TypeScript file. Before discussing how ts-loader handles this, it’s helpful to review at a really basic level what tsc itself does here. If you were to run tsc on this tiny example project, the build would fail with the error:

error TS6305: Output file 'lib/niftyUtil.d.ts' has not been built from source file 'lib/niftyUtil.ts'.

Using project references actually instructs tsc not to build anything that’s part of another project from source, but rather to look for any .d.ts and .js files that have already been generated from a previous build. Since we’ve never built the project in lib before, those files don’t exist, so building the root project fails. Still just thinking about how tsc works, there are two options to make the build succeed: either run tsc -p lib/tsconfig.json first, or simply run tsc --build, which will figure out that lib hasn’t been built and build it first for you.

Ok, so how is that relevant to ts-loader? Because the best way to think about what ts-loader does with project references is that it acts like tsc, but not like tsc --build. If you run ts-loader on a project that’s using project references, and any upstream project hasn’t been built, you’ll get the exact same error TS6305 that you would get with tsc. If you modify a source file in an upstream project and don’t rebuild that project, ts-loader won’t have any idea that you’ve changed anything—it will still be looking at the output from the last time you built that file.

“Hey, don’t you think that sounds kind of useless and terrible?” Well, sort of. You can consider it a work-in-progress. It’s true that on its own, as of today, ts-loader doesn’t have everything you need to take advantage of project references in webpack. In practice, though, consuming upstream projects and building upstream projects are somewhat separate concerns. Building them will likely come in a future release. For background, see the original issue.

outDir Windows problemo. At the moment, composite projects built using the outDir compiler option cannot be consumed using ts-loader on Windows. If you try to, ts-loader throws a “has not been built from source file” error. We don’t know why yet; it’s possible there’s a bug in tsc. It’s more likely there’s a bug in ts-loader. Hopefully it’s going to get solved at some point. (Hey, maybe you’re the one to solve it!) Either way, we didn’t want to hold back from releasing. So if you’re building on Windows then avoid building composite projects using outDir.

TypeScript version compatibility. As a final caveat, this commit to TypeScript is necessary for the include or exclude options of a project-referenced tsconfig file to work. It should be released in TypeScript 3.1.1 according to the tags. To use an earlier version of TypeScript, referenced project configuration files must specify files, and not include.

Usage with webpack watch

Because TS will generate .js and .d.ts files, you should ignore these files, otherwise watchers may go into an infinite watch loop. For example, when using webpack, you may wish to add this to your webpack.conf.js file:

 plugins: [
   new webpack.WatchIgnorePlugin([
     /\.js$/,
     /\.d\.ts$/
   ])
 ],

It’s worth noting that use of the LoaderOptionsPlugin is only supposed to be a stopgap measure. You may want to look at removing it entirely.

Hot Module replacement

To enable webpack-dev-server HMR, you need to follow the official webpack HMR guide, then tweak a few config options for ts-loader. The required configuration is as follows:

Set transpileOnly to true (see transpileOnly for config details and recommendations above).
Inside your HMR acceptance callback function, you must re-require the module that was replaced.

For a boilerplate HMR project using React, check out the react-hot-boilerplate example.

For a minimal HMR TypeScript setup, go to the hot-module-replacement example.

Contributing

This is your TypeScript loader! We want you to help make it even better. Please feel free to contribute; see the contributor’s guide to get started.

License

MIT License

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