How to put TypeScript tsconfig in another location

Issue

I am trying to create a repo that houses our company's common linting rules in our locally hosted github instance. This way we all have a common set of rules we can share easily. There are also configs for our typescript definitions, and PrettierJs rules.

The file structure looks like:

/lint-common
  /config
    .eslintrc.js
    .pretterrc
    tsconfig.json
  package.json 

When installed in another project it looks like this:

/node_modules
  /lint-common
    /config
      .eslintrc.js
      .pretterrc
      tsconfig.json
    package.json 
package.json <-- Consuming package for the project that lint-common has been installed into

From my consuming project that has lint-common installed, I have scripts in the package.json that looks like this:

"scripts": {
  "lint": "eslint -c /node_modules/lint-common/config/.eslintrc.js --ext .js src",
  "pretty": "prettier --write --config /node_modules/lint-common/config/.prettierrc src/**/*.js"
}

This works fine so far. But when I try to do this for TypeScript, it behaves quite differently. Where lint and pretty process from the src directory I specify, the tsconfig insists on processing files from its own location.

For TypeScript, I tried to add a script like this:

"tsc": "tsc --p ../../config/tsconfig.json",

The --p is the --project option - which allows me to stipulate where the tsconfig file is. Inside the tsconfig I have:

"include": ["src/**/*]

However, I only get the following error:

No inputs were found in config file ...

I can fix this by changing it to:

"include": ["../../../src/**/*]

The include option inside the tsconfig is searching for the files relative to the location of the tsconfig - not from where I am running the npm command from.

Is there a way I can get around this? I have tried using the rootDir option, but that doesn't seem to have any effect.

Solution

Is there a way I can get around this?

The documentation doesn't mention a way, and AFAIK, there isn't.

I think a workable solution would be to include an npm [post-install] script which creates a tsconfig.json file, at the top level of a new project, which utilizes the extends property to reference the config nested within node_modules.

Answered By - jsejcksn