til/typescript/generate-an-initial-tsconfig-file.md

Generate An Initial tsconfig File

A new tsconfig.json file can be generated using the tsc CLI which is part of the typescript node package.

You'll first want to add typescript to your project:

$ npm install typescript --save-dev

Since it is a local project dependency, you'll want to add tsc as a script in your package.json.

"scripts": {
  "tsc": "tsc"
}

Now you can use npm to run tsc --init like so:

$ npm run tsc -- --init

Notice the delimiting -- which tells npm to pass the remaining arguments to the command being invoked. This makes sure --init gets passed as an argument to tsc.

This will generate a huge, mostly commented-out tsconfig.json file full of annotations that looks something like this:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    /* Visit https://aka.ms/tsconfig to read more about this file */

    /* Projects */
    // "incremental": true,                              /* Save .tsbuildinfo files to allow for incremental compilation of projects. */
    /* ... */

    /* Language and Environment */
    "target": "es2016",                                  /* Set the JavaScript language version for emitted JavaScript and include compatible library declarations. */
    /* ... */
  }
}

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