tsx VS esbuild-runner

I really enjoy frontend/node/typescript development. I roll my eyes whenever the HN-types complain about CSS or frontend development being a hellhole. Mostly the comments I see seem ignorant or impatient ("Why doesn't this thing work without be bothering to learn it?")

However, the intersection of typescript, nodejs, and ES modules is consistently the most frustrating experience I ever have. Trying to figure out which magic incantation of tsconfig/esbuild/tsc/node options will let me just write code and run it is a fools errand. You might figure something out, and then you try to use Jest and then you descend into madness again.

The biggest tip I can give people is to ditch ts-node and just use (the awkwardly named) tsx https://github.com/privatenumber/tsx, which pretty much just "mostly works" for running Typescript during dev for node.

The problem mostly seems to stem for all the stakeholders being pretty dogmatic to whatever their goals are, rather than the pragmatic option of just meeting people where they are. I really wish the Node, Typescript, Deno/Bun, and maybe some bundler people would come together and figure out how to make this easier for people.

If your TypeORM entity is written in TypeScript, you have to run ERDIA using ts-node or tsx as follows.

Want to import a package / file conveniently from esm.sh or unpkg or directly from a GitHub repo for a one-off script (for example). To do this I created a custom ESBuild plugin to handle HTTP imports - that worked for ,js files. To support running both ESM and CJS, I use tsx.

I prefer tsx honestly. Nodemon will detect that your using TypeScript and switch from node to ts-node but tsx is a no config necessary version of ts-node that also runs faster. Of course you can configure ts-node to use swc to be faster but then you're playing with config files to get things working.

I highly recommend you give this a shot over ts-node

Dude I just worked on a PoC a few hours ago. What I did was use ReactDOM's renderToStaticMarkup and tsx to execute the script so I get jsx transpilation on the fly.

I’ve been trying to adopt Deno into new projects, but I find Node through tsx good enough.

try tsx. it has support for watch mode and works great with esm module projects.

This is the answer: https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx

Have a look at https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx

_tsx is a CLI command (alternative to node) for seamlessly running TypeScript & ESM, in both commonjs & module package types.

It's powered by esbuild so it's insanely fast._

You can then use esbuild-runner to allow you to run tests written in TS. This will also work for any other test runner (mocha, tape, uvu, etc). Jest requires a bit more fiddling, as per usual. An alternative is running tests via TS-node, but it's little a bit slower.

via ESbuild https://github.com/folke/esbuild-runner