Ditching typings for NPM @types

Managing TypeScript type files (*.d.ts) for third-party libraries has been a pain for a while; in the distant past of last year, I used the NPM package tsd, which has since been superseded by typings. Neither of these felt particularly nice to use, and I’ve been passively searching for alternatives.

The other day, I found out that NPM has typings support built-in! For example, to install JQuery types, one simply runs:

npm install --save-dev @types/jquery

Boom! If we look under node_modules, we see:

• node_modules
  • @types
    • jquery
      • index.d.ts

It’s a wonderful thing. But wait! Now TypeScript, or rather Visual Studio, doesn’t know where to find the typings! Horror, whatever shall we do? Not to worry, turns out that TypeScript has us covered. In tsconfig.json, we simply add:

{
  ...
  compilerOptions: {
    ...
    typeRoots: [ "node_modules/@types" ]
  }
  ...
}

(You may need to close/open the project a few times before VS gets the message!)

So it’s goodbye typings – one less tool to worry about on the chain.