Do you bundle your server-side TypeScript?

When you have server-side code in TypeScript, it cannot be run directly by default, you have several options.

• ts-node -O '{"module": "commonjs"}' src/index.ts or ts-node-dev -O '{"module": "commonjs"}' src/index.ts
• nodemon with register ts-node
• tsc the node dist/index.js

I believe, it is best to tsc first, as ts-node isn't meant for production.

Also, if you use Babel, or some special JavaScript features, you will need build steps, anyway (with @babel/cli).

Now, if you have multiple TypeScript folders, not just src/, like tests/, it becomes complex to use tsc (you need multiple tsconfig.json). What would you do? Use a bundler? Which one?

My current option is using Webpack with webpack-node-externals with the following settings.

// webpack.config.js

const path = require('path')

const nodeExternals = require('webpack-node-externals')

module.exports = {
  mode: 'production',
  devtool: false,
  optimization: {
    minimize: false
  },
  entry: './src/index.ts',
  output: {
    filename: 'index.js',
    path: path.resolve(process.env.OUT_DIR || 'dist')
  },
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.tsx?$/,
        loader: 'ts-loader'
      }
    ]
  },
  resolve: {
    extensions: ['.ts', '.tsx', '.js', '.json']
  },
  target: 'node',
  externals: [
    nodeExternals()
  ]
}

Tried Babel and Rollup, but it failed with emitDecoratorMetadata and reflect-metadata. I cannot use Typegoose, nor liteorm.

Comments

[Hendrik Richert]

At work, we do transpile it to good old node-js javascript for portability (cloud) reasons mainly.
Using NestJS you kind of get this out of the box though with their compiler cli