Set TypeScript compiler's base/working directory

[slavafomin]

It looks like TypeScript compiler resolves files relative to the location of the tsconfig.json file (however, I couldn't find anything about paths resolution in the official documentation).

Is there a way to specify an alternative base/working directory, which will be used for relative paths resolution?

I want to use a generic tsconfig.json file to compile multiple projects in various directories (one at a time).

P/S: I've created a question on StackOverflow first, but haven't received any attention there, so I've decided to ask here directly.

[RyanCavanaugh]

You might be looking for rootDir or baseUrl? A concrete example of what you want to happen would be extremely useful.

[slavafomin]

Thank you Ryan for a response.

But, according to the docs, the rootDir option affects only the output directory structure and the baseUrl option is for non-relative modules (like node_modules I guess?).

I will try to explain better. I have multiple projects with very similar directory structure and compilation requirements. I would like to define compilation options (including relative paths to source files from the root of the project directory) in a single place. Therefore I have a single tsconfig.json file, which I want to use to compile multiple projects. However, the compiler is trying to resolve the source files, specified in the config, not from the project root directory, but from the directory, where this generic tsconfig.json file is located.

---

Consider, I have the following generic tsconfig.json file in ~/common/tsconfig.json:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
    },
    "include": [
        "index.ts",
        "src/**/*.ts"
    ],
    "exclude": [
        "node_modules",
        "**/*.spec.ts"
    ]
}

And I have multiple projects like ~/project1, ~/project2, etc. I want to run the compiler like this:

tsc --project ~/common/tsconfig.json --projectRoot ~/project1 and I want it to start compilation using files, located in ~/project1/src/**/*.ts and not in ~/common/src/**/*.ts.

Also, I don't want to use extends functionality of the tsconfig.json, because I want projects to be agnostic from the location of the generic config.

I hope it makes sense.

[RyanCavanaugh]

I see. There's currently no support for this but we could think about ways to accomplish it. The scenario makes a lot of sense IMO

[slavafomin]

Thanks. I would love to see this implemented. Right now I have to manually use gulp-typescript just in order to specify a list of files to compile. It would be nice to invoke tsc directly.

[itonics-tbeauvais]

This would be great!

[siddthesciencekid]

+1 This feature would be awesome

[hipstersmoothie]

I have the same use case. My team is currently building out a component library. The repo is a monorepo and each component is written in typescript. Currently I have to have a tsconfig.json in each package that looks like this

{
  "extends": "../../tsconfig.json",
  "include": ["src/**/*", "../../typings/**/*"]
}

This is a lot of duplication. I need to add another tsconfig for build related things. To do this in my current setup I would have to double the amount of tiny tsconfigs in the project.

I've been playing around with moving the tsconfig to our scripts package but can't get it to work because file resolution is relative to the tsconfig. If there was some way to set the --projectRoot from the cli I could get rid of all of these tiny files. It is important that i can set it from the CLI too. A tsconfig option would not suit my use case.

[TidyIQ]

This is a big issue when using "extends": "path/to/tsconfig.json". It means the extending config can't use includes, excludes, outDir, rootDir, or any option that includes a path as the path to these files are relative to the tsconfig that is extending, instead of being relative to the tsconfig that is extended, which makes a lot more sense.

[Fr33maan]

Very surprising to not be able to compile just the src directory for exemple. I have some utils directories in my projects which I don't need to be compiled. Additionally I would like to have the src and dist dir at the same level. Looks like I need babel to do that or did I misunderstood something ?

[hipstersmoothie]

@L1br3 you should be able to have those at the same level. Here is an example https://github.com/hipstersmoothie/eslint-formatter-github