TypeScript is all the rage in JavaScript land and I'm enjoying the ride so far. I shall refrain from debating TypeScript vs. JavaScript or geeting started activities. This article's focus getting a TypeScript (server side) project going in VSCode. It reflects what worked for me with my limited knowledge.

Who's at the party?

On a first look it seems, one just needs tsc and all is good. However there are more moving parts involved, lets have a look:

VSCode plugins, style and build automation shall be subject to a future post, lets focus on the TypeScript parts here. Let's get started with sample ExpressJS project. My test framework of choice shall be MochaJS with the Chai assertion library.

#!/bin/bash
# Setting up an Express TypeScript project
mkdir ts-demo
cd ts-demo
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gitignore/main/Node.gitignore -o .gitignore
git init -q
npm init -y
npm install --save express
npm install --save-dev @types/express @types/node
npm install --save-dev chai chai-as-promised mocha ts-node ts-node-dev typescript
npm install --save-dev @types/chai @types/chai-as-promised @types/mocha
mkdir src
mkdir test

We see, development has more dependencies than runtime. Note all the @types packages are only needed in development, so the are added to the devDependencies only.