Typescript is not compiling `node_modules` folder

Question

I can't figure out why TypeScript isn't compiling anything that's inside the node_modules folder.

Here is my tsconfig.json:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "rootDir": ".",
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      "shared": ["./src/shared"],
      "client": ["./src/client"],
      "server": ["./src/server"],
      "express": ["./node_modules/express"]
    },
    "plugins": [
      {"transform": "ts-transformer-imports"}
    ],
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "allowJs": true,
    "target": "es2015",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "outDir": "./build"
  },  
  "files": ["./src/server/app.ts"]
}

Inside src/server/app.ts I import both express and shared:

import shared from 'shared';
import express from 'express';

The compilation succeeds, and compiled code for shared and server are generated. But, for some reason, the code for express isn't generated!?

This makes absolutely no sense to me... does it randomly decide to not compile something just because it's in a folder called node_modules?

How can I fix this?

Edit: I also tried changing it to "express/*": ["./node_modules/express/*"] in the config file, which didn't make any difference. (I don't know why it would, but I found that somewhere on the internet)

Lajos Gallay · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-13 11:23:24Z

1

Why do you want to compile a package from node_modules? E.g. ./node_modules/express does NOT contains any TS files. NPM packages usually comes with pre-built (or pre-polyfilled) JS code that you have to just import and use. If you have trouble importing e.g. something from Express be sure that you've installed the typings (@types/express) as well

answered Jun 13, 2019 at 11:23

Lajos Gallay

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5 Comments

David Callanan Over a year ago

I don't exactly want TypeScript to compile the code in node_modules/express, but I want it to add that code to the output folder `"./build"

Lajos Gallay Over a year ago

I see. I think you shouldn't add to your output - your compiled code can import it from 'node_modules'. Your build/dist/out folders should contain only code from your /src folder. You can read about module resolution here: typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/module-resolution.html

David Callanan Over a year ago

Yes, it does make more sense to resolve the modules from node_modules at runtime. The problem is, I have separate client and server builds, which share some of the same code. The server build should not have any of the node modules that only the client is using. I was hoping to leave it up to the TypeScript compiler to determine which node modules need to be added to the build folder, by going through the import statements in my server code.

Lajos Gallay Over a year ago

You should take a look at yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/workspaces. This allows you to organize your project into e.g. shared, server and client 'workspaces' with shared and separated dependencies as well. You can check TS project references typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/project-references.html to define the dependencies on each other - but it works still only your packages, not the ones in node_modules.

David Callanan Over a year ago

Thanks, I'll take a look

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