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TheAifam5 graciously reported an issue for react-use-localstorage that even though it was written using TypeScript, it wasn't distributing TypeScript type declaration file.

react-use-localstorage is a React Hook that returns an array of Local Storage item and a way to set it

Initially written in JavaScript but recently converted to TypeScript to learn TypeScript.

I followed TheAifam5's instruction to generate a type file and distributed it.

But when I tried to use the new distrubution within a React + TypeScript project, I was getting the following error.

Error Message

Error Message in VS Code

Below is the full source code for useLocalStorage .

useLocalStorage - react-use-localstorage on NPM

As you can see, useLocalStorage returns an array of [item, setItem] .

When auto-generating a type file using tsc , TypeScript generates following definition code.

Bad return type

TypeScript inferred the return type as (string | ((item: string) => void))[] which is not right.

So to fix it you need to explicitly declare the return type of useLocalStorage to generate a correct type definition.

Return type specified explicitly

You can now see that TypeScript has generated the definition correctly.

Good return type

And TypeScript is happy (in VS Code).

TypeScript is now 🙂

🤔 Question to readers

Does anyone know why TypeScript wasn't able to infer the return type correctly?

UPDATE: 2019-02-12

pgrizzay & AngularBeginner have generously answered the question above in Reddit.

The gist is that, TypeScript does not infer tuple type variable because there isn't enough information.

🏔 Resources