Development

If you'd like a more guided walkthrough, see Contributing to a create-typescript-app Repository. It'll walk you through the common activities you'll need to contribute.

After forking the repo from GitHub and installing pnpm:

git clone https://github.com/(your-name-here)/create-typescript-app
cd create-typescript-app
pnpm install

This repository includes a list of suggested VS Code extensions. It's a good idea to use VS Code and accept its suggestion to install them, as they'll help with development.

Building

Run tsdown locally to build source files from src/ into output files in lib/:

pnpm build

Add --watch to run the builder in a watch mode that continuously cleans and recreates lib/ as you save files:

pnpm build --watch

Built App Debugging

This repository includes a VS Code launch configuration for debugging. To debug a bin app, add a breakpoint to your code, then run Debug Program from the VS Code Debug panel (or press F5). VS Code will automatically run the build task in the background before running bin/index.js.

Formatting

Prettier is used to format code. It should be applied automatically when you save files in VS Code or make a Git commit.

To manually reformat all files, you can run:

pnpm format --write

Linting

This package includes several forms of linting to enforce consistent code quality and styling. Each should be shown in VS Code, and can be run manually on the command-line:

• pnpm lint (ESLint with typescript-eslint): Lints source files, including JavaScript, Markdown, and TypeScript
• pnpm lint:knip (knip): Detects unused files, dependencies, and code exports
• pnpm lint:spelling (cspell): Spell checks across all source files

Read the individual documentation for each linter to understand how it can be configured and used best.

For example, ESLint can be run with --fix to auto-fix some lint rule complaints:

pnpm run lint --fix

Note that you'll need to run pnpm build before pnpm lint so that lint rules which check the file system can pick up on any built files.

Testing

Vitest is used for tests. You can run it locally on the command-line:

pnpm run test

Add the --coverage flag to compute test coverage and place reports in the coverage/ directory:

pnpm run test --coverage

Note that console-fail-test is enabled for all test runs. Calls to console.log, console.warn, and other console methods will cause a test to fail.

Debugging Tests

This repository includes a VS Code launch configuration for debugging unit tests. To launch it, open a test file, then run Debug Current Test File from the VS Code Debug panel (or press F5).

Type Checking

You should be able to see suggestions from TypeScript in your editor for all open files.

However, it can be useful to run the TypeScript command-line (tsc) to type check all files in src/:

pnpm tsc

Add --watch to keep the type checker running in a watch mode that updates the display as you save files:

pnpm tsc --watch