Converting Stingray to Typescript

We are trying, slowly but surely, to convert the whole Javascript codebase of Stingray to Typescript. We are first renaming our JavaScript files to .ts assuming all of our types are any. And as a second pass we will add all sorts of more specialized type descriptions. We hope our story will compare to this one in terms of success. Our code base is about 100k Lines of code of JavaScript so we won’t be able to do this in a night.

How to handle multiple typescript projects?

Our current typescript setup contains multiple tsconfig.json (i.e Typescript project) files. We have one such project file for our core library. But each of our plugins will have its own tsconfig.json since plugins have a slightly different build setup than the core library. Problem is: typescript built in watcher (tsc -w) doesn’t support watching more than one tsconfig.json file.

Webstorm handles this multi-project file setup really. But VsCode, my current editor of choice, doesn’t.

tspw

Lo and behold here comes the brand new Typescript Project Watcher (or tspw for short) to the rescue! I have written, with [Schmidt] (https://github.com/jschmidt42) help, a small node app that manages to start multiple tsc instances to watch all the tsconfig.json you could want to.

tspw is available on npm here with the github repo here. Here is how to use it:

Syntax: tspw [options]
 
Examples:   tspw -r .
            tspw -p .\editor\core .\plugins\log_console\tsconfig.json
            tspw -r . -tsc .\node_modules\typscript\bin\tsc
            tspw -r . -tsc-args "--allowJs true --alwaysStrict true"
 
--root (-r) <rootdir> : <rootdir> and all resursive directory willl be scanned for tsconfig.json
--projects (-p) <projectDirOrFile1> <projectDirOrFile2> ... : Start watcher on the list of dir or files
--tsc (-t) <pathToTsc> : where to find tsc. By default look for globally installed.
--tsc-args <args> : string to pass to tsc
--simulate : print which watchers would be started

This was my first npm module published and I was surprised how easy it was. No wonder npm is filled with such a high number of (crappy??) modules!