Aurelia bundling fails when using relative import path

Question

I'm using aurelia with typescript and I wanted to avoid using relative import path like :

import { DialogBox } from '../../resources/elements/dialog-box';

but rather

import { DialogBox } from 'resources/elements/dialog-box';

I modified my tsconfig.json so the compiler handles relative paths by adding baseUrl and paths like this:

"compilerOptions": {
"sourceMap": true,
"target": "es5",
"module": "amd",
"declaration": false,
"noImplicitAny": false,
"removeComments": true,
"emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
"experimentalDecorators": true,
"moduleResolution": "node",
"lib": ["es2015", "dom"],
"baseUrl": ".",
"paths": {
  "*":["src/*"]
}

}...

But when I run the cli's command 'au run --watch', I can see all steps working fine up to the writeBundle step that fails when tracing some files:

Starting 'processMarkup'...
Starting 'processCSS'...
Starting 'configureEnvironment'...
Finished 'configureEnvironment'
Starting 'buildTypeScript'...
Finished 'processCSS'
Finished 'processMarkup'
Finished 'buildTypeScript'
Starting 'writeBundles'...

The process fails with the following error:

Tracing resources/elements/dialog-box...
{ uid: 11,
  name: 'writeBundles',
  branch: false,
  error:
   { [Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\...\src\resources\elements\dialog-box.js']
     errno: -4058,

The strange thing is: there are other files that are referenced with non-relative path and where the bundler doesn't fail.

And another strange thing: if I leave the relative path and bundle using the watcher, everything works fine. Then if I remove the relative '../../' from the problematic import, I get a bundling warning but everything works anyway...

Any idea what I might have done wrong?

EDITED FOR CORRECTION:

I just understoof why some files seemed to be bundled while others were not. I noticed that all the files with "root-relative" imports that didn't fail were actually imported from other files with a relative path. So I suppose the bundler finds them from there. That solves one thing but the base problem is still there : aurelia-cli fails bundling when there are "root-relative" imports...

EDITED FOR SOLUTION: Thanks to the solution of Sinan Bolel here under, the relative path problem was solved by updating some packages:

npm i -D gulp-typescript@^3.1.5 typings@^2.1.0 aurelia-tools@^1.0.0

The semantic errors I got afterward came from some typings that were still installed and not needed as well as having typescript installed as a local npm package as well as globally. I uninstalled them and all errors disappeared.

npm uninstall @types/es6-promise
npm uninstall @types/es6-collections
npm uninstall typescript

Answer 1

Take a look at this Gist example in which:

• I create a class Init in src/lib/init.ts
• I import init from 'lib/init' in src/main.ts without a relative path
• I change main.ts to import environment from 'environment' as opposed to from './environment' -- which also works.

Using the original tsconfig generated by the CLI , my build failed with the error:

src/main.ts(3,18): error TS2307: Cannot find module 'lib/init'.

After changing to the tsconfig in my Gist , the build succeeded.

(invalid) Suggestions:

In tsconfig, can you please try:

a) Adding ./ ahead of src in compilerOptions.paths (this solves the issue on my machine)

  paths: {"*": ["./src/*"]}
                 ^

b) Adding filesGlob

"filesGlob": [
  "./src/**/*.ts",
  "./test/**/*.ts",
  "./typings/index.d.ts",
  "./custom_typings/**/*.d.ts"
],

---

edit: Previous suggestions did not work, how about updating packages:

npm i -D gulp-typescript@^3.1.5 typings@^2.1.0 aurelia-tools@^1.0.0

See results in https://github.com/aurelia/cli/issues/494#issuecomment-282103289