I’ve recently migrated a React component

package named react-trix to TypeScript and wanted to talk about the experience of creating anNPM package in TypeScript.

I’m not here to convinced you to start using TypeScript, Flow or [insert name of latest JavaScript type checker] compiler. Jason Dreyzehner wrote an excellent article if you want to know more about giving TypeScript a chance here.

I’ve been using TypeScript for ~3 years now but I never published a public NPM package with it and I could not find much in terms of recent article other than this one from Michel Weststrate for TypeScript < 2.0. So here we are.

You can clone this repository if you want to follow from your code editor. This is a quick starting point project where you can simply edit the package.json file, run npm install and create your TypeScript React component(s).

The project structure

I normally create a project directorywith the following directories/files structure for NPM packages.

```shell . ├── lib ├── LICENSE ├── main.js ├── package.json ├── README.md ├── src ├── tests ├── test.sh ├── tsconfig.json

Let’s install TypeScript: `npm install typescript -g` You might need to use `sudo`if you’re not using [NVM](https://github.com/creationix/nvm), but I would suggest you start doing it if you don’t ;), this is out of scope of this article though, but NVM make it easier to have side-by-side Node versions installed in your user space. At minimum you’ll need React and ReactDOM packages with their appropriate typings packages: `npm install react react-dom @types/react @types/react-dom --save-dev` The `@types/react` and `@types/react-dom` are useful to help the TypeScript compiler understand external libraries and also let your code editor offer you a better experience. I’m using [vscode](https://code.visualstudio.com/) and the TypeScript and Go experiences for writing code is what I enjoy at the moment. ### The TypeScript configuration file It’s easier to have a TypeScript configuration file when calling the TypeScript compiler `tsc`rather than having to supply the arguments via the CLI. The file is named `tsconfig.json` and will be loaded automatically. ```json { "compilerOptions": { "outDir": "./lib", "target": "es5", "module": "commonjs", "noImplicitAny": true, "removeComments": true, "declaration": true, "sourceMap": true, "jsx": "react" }, "include": [ "./src/**/*.tsx", "./src/**/*.ts" ], "exclude": [ "node_modules" ] }

To stay compatible with the “world” our TypeScript source files will need to be compiled to JavaScript so when other developers install and use our package they will in fact import a standard EcmaScript 5 source code.

The target is set to es5 meaning that we want the compiler to produce code compatible with this standard and we’re also saying that our module will be the commonjs same as Node.

There’s two important properties in here, the declaration and the jsx .

The jsx option tells the compiler we’re going to have React’s JSX in our TypeScript source.

The declaration indicates that we want to generate declaration files so other TypeScript developers will have a nicer experience when they install our package.

Remember those @types/react packages we installed previously for React? Our package will include its own TypeScript definition files d.ts . They accomplish the same goals as the @types/react for example, but are part of our NPM package.

A first TypeScript React component

It’s time to write a first React component in TypeScript, we’ll write a simple component for now.

import * as React from " react " ; export class Hello extends React . Component < {}, {} > { constructor () { super (); } render () { return < h1 > Hello world < /h1> ; } }

Alright, time to test our component. And no we will not use another project, at least not for now. It’s not time to test our package, it’s time to test our React component and we will also use TypeScript to do that.

We’ll start by installing the needed packages:

react-addons-test-utils mocha --save-dev

Testing React component is out of scope of this article. But this is part of publishing an NPM package I think. So I’m not going to talk much about why I’m using Mocha instead of Jest etc. I’m a strong believer in:

use whatever languages, frameworks and tools you like and #JFDI.

Once you have those packages installed we will first create a TypeScript configuration file inside our tests directory:

{ "compilerOptions" : { "outDir" : "./" , "target" : "es5" , "module" : "commonjs" , "noImplicitAny" : false , "removeComments" : true , "sourceMap" : false , "jsx" : "react" }, "include" : [ "./*.tsx" , "./*.ts" ], "exclude" : [ "node_modules" ] }

I’m often using npm test with a bash script to run my tests, so here’s my typical script:

#!/bin/bash cd tests tsc cd .. ./node_modules/.bin/mocha tests/tests/ * _test.js exit 0

Basically we are running the TypeScript compiler against our _test test files and we run Mocha on the generated JavaScript files.

Let’s create a first test for our Hello component.

import * as React from " react " ; import { expect } from " chai " ; import { shallow , mount , render } from " enzyme " ; import { spy } from " sinon " ; import { Hello } from " ../src/hello " ; describe ( " <Hello /> " , () => { it ( " renders the the h1 " , () => { const wrapper = shallow ( < Hello /> ); expect ( wrapper . find ( " h1 " )). to . have . length ( 1 ); }); });

Thanks to Enzyme it’s easy to test our React component without having to use a full/head-less browser. Depending on the complexity of your component you might need to use the mount function instead of shallow and use something like jsdom to emulate a full DOM for React.

Our Hello component is simple enough that we’re able to test it via shallow and running npm test on a terminal shows us our passing test.

[ dstpierre@roadmap]: ~/projects/tmp> $ npm test > tmp@1.0.0 test /home/dstpierre/projects/tmp > ./test.sh <Hello /> ✓ renders the the h1 1 passing ( 11ms )

So Enzyme and Mocha allow us to develop our React component(s) and not have to worry about packaging and testing on another project or a debug HTML page.

This pretty much resume the flow of how you can develop/test your React component:

You create .tsx and .ts files in the src directory You create tests in the tests directory for your TypeScript code You run your tests and start at #1 until your package is at a place where you want to see it in an external app.

Testing the installation of our package

Running tsc on the root of our project creates the standard EcmaScript 5 JavaScript files into the lib directory.

But before someone can installs our package and imports our Hello component we need to make sure it’s exported and that our package.json file has an entry for the main option.

I usually simply create a main.js at the root of my project with the following code:

exports . Hello = require ( " ./lib/hello " ). Hello ;

Pointing to this file in package.json :

{ ... "main" : "main.js" ... }

We also need to specify which files we want included in the package. We set this via the files entry of package.json :

{ ... ... }

And lastly our TtypeScript definition file via the types entry of package.json :

{ ... "types" : "./lib/hello.d.ts" ... }

This is just how I like to work, there’s tons of way to do this, so please if you don’t find this to your taste, adjust to whatever makes you happy.

In my package.json file I usually add a prepublish entry on the scripts section like this:

{ ... "scripts" : [ "build" : "rm ./lib/* && tsc" , "prepublish" : "npm run build" , "test" : "./test.sh" ] }

The prepublish entry will be running every time the npm package is publishing via npm publish or creates a local package via npm pack .

When I want to test my package I just create it with npm pack this creates a .tgz file that I can install in an external app:

$> npm install ../my-component/my-component-1.0.0.tgz --save

And now on this testing external app we’re able to use the component as normal via TypeScript or standard es2015:

import { Hello } from " my-component " ; ... render () { return ( < div > < p > external app < /p > < Hello /> < /div > ) }

That’s it!

We have a fully testable TypeScript npm package with one or multiple React components ready to be installed locally or published via the public NPM repository.

You might want to check out npm link if you would prefer not to manually pack the component and install it each time. Depending on what you are building this might be a smoother flow. I tend to rely on Enzyme for testing and occasionally test the package in an external app, so the npm pack and npm install is not a big thing for me.

Make sure to click the like button if you have appreciated this tutorial.

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