[WIP] TypeScript final touches

[brunolemos]

I'll push my attempts here. Help needed. cc @Timer

• Don't make users install fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin #5510 Don't make users install fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin
• Ensure TypeScript files outside of build are not checked for build errors #5509 Ensure TypeScript files outside of build are not checked for build errors
• Automatically generate and validate tsconfig.json #5508 Automatically generate and validate tsconfig.json

[brunolemos]

#5515, #5516, #5519

[ianschmitz]

@Timer we went through the same issues on #5509 in create-react-app-typescript.

The fix implemented in 7231285 works great when developing in the source files, however it means when working within the test files, they no longer are using the configuration within tsconfig.json.

I initially was thinking that we could potentially exclude those files via config merging when configuring ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin. However it seems that their config only accepts a path to the tsconfig.json.

It may be worth a little more thinking here?

[Timer]

For now, I'm OK with excluding test files. I wish it was more like awesome-typescript-loader which allows you to override configuration values on the fly. Do you have a good proposition? We can't let test files fail the build -- it should only fail tests.

[ianschmitz]

I totally agree. I know from personal experience in create-react-app-typescript that it is super annoying to have changes to the source code start yelling at you about errors in your unit tests when running npm start. It is a continuous source of pain among our team.

I tend to agree with @frankwallis's comment over at #4837 (comment). I wonder if allowing configuration overrides when configuring the plugin would solve the issue of ignoring test build errors (configure an exclude to ignore all tests files in the tsconfig).

/cc @johnnyreilly

[johnnyreilly]

I totally agree. I know from personal experience in create-react-app-typescript that it is super annoying to have changes to the source code start yelling at you about errors in your unit tests when running npm start. It is a continuous source of pain among our team.

tend to agree with @frankwallis's comment over at #4837 (comment). I wonder if allowing configuration overrides when configuring the plugin would solve the issue of ignoring test build errors (configure an exclude to ignore all tests files in the tsconfig).

@ianschmitz - fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin awaits your pull request 😄

Quite seriously; we're completely open to making changes that will improve the developer experience. Feel free to experiment and share.

[ianschmitz]

@Timer what are your thoughts? I don't mind implementing something over at fork-ts-checker if that would help. I originally thought of the idea after having used ts-loader. They have an option that is quite handy that lets you override your configuration that you specified in tsconfig.json: https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-loader#compileroptions-object-default.

We have used that option internally on projects, where we wanted to change the target from es5 to es2017 when running npm start so it emits a much nicer output (doesn't have all the async/await generator junk that is hard to debug).

[Timer]

Adding a compilerOptions options feature to fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin that overrides would be great.

[ianschmitz]

👍 I'll get on that tonight!

[ianschmitz]

Argh I totally had a brain fart. I forgot that exclude isn't part of compilerOptions 😢. Realized it when implementing #5537.

That being said i've added the feature to fork-ts-checker over at TypeStrong/fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin#173. May be useful to us in other ways! 😃