I’ve played with TypeScript before and used Gulp for task automation. Now I wanted to do some more TypeScript experimenting, and decided I want to be cool(er) and use webpack.

So, I was looking for a simple starter kit to get me going with my experiments without setting up the environment too much. All I wanted was to write TypeScript and the tools to handle compiling it and live reloading the result in the browser.

Turns out that’s not an easy thing to find and you either find tools to scaffold something more elaborate with UI frameworks and whatnot, or you have to start from scratch.

The closest thing I was able to find is this “TypeScript Webpack Starter” which is close but still has way more than I need for a simple one-off experiment.

So I started from scratch and created a very simplistic setup that does the minimum needed — compiles and bundles your TypeScript and live reloads the browser. Then in the spirit of sharing and to make it easier for me to reuse, I’ve released it on GitHub. You can find the Minimalist TypeScript webpack Starter here.

I’m not an expert in either TypeScript or webpack, so I may have missed something important, but it works for my current purpose and DOESN’T do anything else. I may end up adding something in the future, and feel free to submit a pull request if you feel like something essential is missing.

Let me know if you find this useful or feel like I just reinvented some wheel that I failed to google.