Overview

The presence of a tsconfig.json file in a directory indicates that the directory is the root of a TypeScript project. The tsconfig.json file specifies the root files and the compiler options required to compile the project. A project is compiled in one of the following ways:

Using tsconfig.json

• By invoking tsc with no input files, in which case the compiler searches for the tsconfig.json file starting in the current directory and continuing up the parent directory chain.
• By invoking tsc with no input files and a --project (or just -p) command line option that specifies the path of a directory containing a tsconfig.json file, or a path to a valid .json file containing the configurations.

When input files are specified on the command line, tsconfig.json files are ignored.

Examples

Example tsconfig.json files:

• Using the "files" property

  json
  {
  "compilerOptions": {
    "module": "commonjs",
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "removeComments": true,
    "preserveConstEnums": true,
    "sourceMap": true
  },
  "files": [
    "core.ts",
    "sys.ts",
    "types.ts",
    "scanner.ts",
    "parser.ts",
    "utilities.ts",
    "binder.ts",
    "checker.ts",
    "emitter.ts",
    "program.ts",
    "commandLineParser.ts",
    "tsc.ts",
    "diagnosticInformationMap.generated.ts"
  ]
  }

• Using the "include" and "exclude" properties

  json
  {
  "compilerOptions": {
    "module": "system",
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "removeComments": true,
    "preserveConstEnums": true,
    "outFile": "../../built/local/tsc.js",
    "sourceMap": true
  },
  "include": ["src/**/*"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules", "**/*.spec.ts"]
  }

Details

The "compilerOptions" property can be omitted, in which case the compiler’s defaults are used. See our full list of supported Compiler Options.

Schema

Schema can be found at: http://json.schemastore.org/tsconfig