Basic

It is extremely easy to get started with tsconfig.json as the basic file you need is:

{}

i.e. an empty JSON file at the root of your project. This way TypeScript will include all the .ts files in this directory (and sub directories) as a part of the compilation context. It will also select a few sane default compiler options.

compilerOptions

You can customize the compiler options using compilerOptions.

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "target": "es5",
        "module": "commonjs",
        "declaration": false,
        "noImplicitAny": false,
        "removeComments": true,
        "noLib": false
    }
}

These (and more) compiler options will be discussed later.

TypeScript compiler

Good IDEs come with built in support for on the fly ts to js compilation. If however you want to run the TypeScript compiler manually from the command line when using tsconfig.json you can do it in a few ways.

• Just run tsc and it will look for tsconfig.json in the current as well as all parent folders till it finds it.
• Run tsc -p ./path-to-project-directory. Of course the path can be a complete or relative to the current directory.

You can even start the TypeScript compiler in watch mode using tsc -w and it will watch your TypeScript project files for changes.