ereqt

Enhanced REQquire of Typescript

Allows you to use all bleeding edge typescript features - for which only ES6 target is available - in nodejs, keeping the source map debugging support.

When you require a .ts file, it is transpiled on the fly and cached to keep resonable performace.

The first compilation step is through TypeScript (with tsconfig.json support) targetting ES6. Second compilation step is through Babel (with .babelrc support) As a third step, the results are ran through sorcery which maps the last source map in the chain to the original source file.

installation

npm install --save-dev ereqt

or just

npm i -D ereqt

usage

This is somewhat complicated due to the current state of debuggers in the wild.

Debugging is only confirmed working on Visual Studio 2015 Community (RC and above) with iojs or nodejs v4.0.0 .

• create new .ts file eg.: dev.ts with the following contents:

  require('ereqt/register');
  setTimeout(function() {		// should fix a bug which causes all breakpoints being ignored in synchronous code on startup
  	require('./index'); 	// update to the actual application antry point
  }, 200);

• set it as an application entry point in your IDE ("Set as Node.js Startup File" in VS)

• create .ereqt.json in your project root:

  {
  	"cacheDir": ".cache"
  }

  Everytime a typescript file is required, this file is looked up upwards in the file system tree starting in the location of the required file. If the file is not found, you'll get a warning and the resulting file will have to be recompiled the next time program runs. The resulting source map will be inlined, but the debugging might not work anyway.

• set breakpoints and start debugging :)

Note: Production use is not recommended.

Contribute

I'm currently looking for ways to enable the debugging support in other IDEs. Any ideas are welcome. If you find a way to make it work in other IDEs/debuggers (code, IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, node-inspector, iron-node, etc.), please submit an issue or pull request.

Current version is far from feature complete, so please submit an issue with your ideas.

Recommendation

Blacklist regenerator in your .babelrc - node supports generators for quite some time now and it makes debugging of async functions much easier