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Comment by arcatek | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't go into how to integrate TypeScript in the monorepo for development - what we do on the Yarn repository is that we point all the package.json `main` fields to the TypeScript sources, then use `publishConfig.main` to update it to the JS artifacts right before being published.

This way, we can use babel-node or ts-node to transparently run our TS files, no transpilation needed.

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By this are you saying your “app” project is the one that actually transpiles the TS from your shared packages?

Wouldn’t that mean the shared packages tsconfigs aren’t respected if you changed something like strict options? And also that a clean build of the whole monorepo is going to recompile each shared file for every app project rather than just once?

Yeah, I would be interested to hear from others how they accomplish this. I played around with Nx and it uses TypeScript project references. It is a lot of boiler plate to set up every time you want to create a new app or library. Fortunately, their generators do this with one command.

In the past, I'd put a "typescript:main" field in package.json and configured my bundler to prefer that field. I gave up at some point - probably when I migrated to rollup.

Moving forward, I'm going to use wireit for these things. Pure modules get built with tsc. At the highest level (e.g. where it needs to be embedded in a page), make a bundle with rollup.

wireit has two nice properties: incremental building and file-system-level dependencies. Within a repo, you can depend on ../package-b. However, if you have multiple monorepos that often get used together, you can also depend on ../../other-project/packages/package-b. No matter where in your tree you make changes, wireit knows when to make a new bundle.

I've just started with wireit (it was only launched recently), but it seems to be a nice solution to wrangling dependencies between related JS libraries.

[1] https://github.com/google/wireit

We use pnpm and meta-updater to keep the TS project references in sync. An example of a project setup that way is pnpm's repo itself.

https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/blob/main/.meta-updater/src/ind...

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