tsc says "No inputs were found" when "outDir": "."

[benmccann]

TypeScript Version: Tested with both 4.1.2 and 4.2.0-dev.20201130

Search Terms:

"No inputs were found"

Code

I get an error message about "No inputs were found" if I have the below in my tsconfig.json. This is extremely confusing because the inputs are indeed present at the location mentioned in the error message

	"compilerOptions" : {
		"outDir": "."
	},

tsc completes successfully if I change the outDir:

	"compilerOptions" : {
		"outDir": "dist"
	},

// A *self-contained* demonstration of the problem follows...
// Test this by running `tsc` on the command-line, rather than through another build tool such as Gulp, Webpack, etc.

Expected behavior:

Ideally tsc should complete successfully and output the .js, .js.map, and .ts.d files alongside my input .ts files. Or if that's something that's not supported then it should tell me that "outDir": "." is not valid or give some other error message is more understandable and actionable

Actual behavior:

TypeScript prints:

No inputs were found in config file 'tsconfig.json'. Specified 'include' paths were '["**/*"]' and 'exclude' paths were '["./"]'.

This is completely wrong. The input is indeed at the given location, so I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what was wrong

Playground Link: I'm not that familiar with the Playground, but it doesn't look like I can control outDir there, so this probably can't be reproduced there

Related Issues: N/A

[DanielRosenwasser]

It's unclear what went wrong since this doesn't really have a self-contained repro, but exclude is implicitly ./**/* so if you wanted ./* you'll have to write that out explicitly.

[sheetalkamat]

I think if you dont specify exclude, the default is to exclude outDir so this seems like working as intended. as @DanielRosenwasser you would need to specify include/exclude depending on what your intent is.

[benmccann]

Thanks for responding. Here's a repo to reproduce: https://github.com/benmccann/tsc-repro. There may be something more complicated here as this only seems to happen when there's a subdirectory present and the tsconfig.json extends another.

I think if you dont specify exclude, the default is to exclude outDir so this seems like working as intended.

Does that also exclude sub-directories? I have . as the outDir and my source is in a src subdirectory. That may be the key because it does work if I set "exclude": ["node_modules"]. If it does, then it was really confusing to me to that the error message (Specified 'include' paths were '["**/*"]' and 'exclude' paths were '["."]') clearly showed subdirectories for the include paths by denoting **/*, but did not do this for the exclude paths. Perhaps there's some sort of path normalization that should occur before printing the error message.

It may also make sense to print a different error if the exclude paths subsume the include paths

[typescript-bot]

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