Typescript setup w/ Meteor 1.5 - cannot find module meteor/meteor

Question

I followed the blog post but that didn't work. Here's my commit: https://github.com/Falieson/react15-meteor1.5/commit/b0c5ccd4f940d980a227789e151c9b1ffb8f71cf

Error

$ meteor
[[[[[ ~/Private/ReactMeteorExample ]]]]]
=> Started proxy.
client/index.tsx (2, 24): Cannot find module 'meteor/meteor'.
=> Started MongoDB.
=> Started your app.

Installed

$ meteor add barbatus:typescript
$ meteor npm install --save @types/meteor @types/react

tsconfig.json

 "compilerOptions": {
    "allowJs": false,
    "alwaysStrict": true,
    "jsx": "react",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "noImplicitAny": false,
    "sourceMap": true,
    "strictNullChecks": false,
    "target": "es5",
    "types": [
      "meteor-typings"
    ]    

Additional question: should the typings be dev dependencies?

Answer 1

The "types" section in the tsconfig file should be unnecessary as you don't have the meteor-typings directory ('meteor-typings' was an old way of doing things).

As the @types packages are only .d.ts files it shouldn't matter whether they are standard or dev dependencies. Personally, I'd leave them as non-dev.

To fix the issue you're getting, add a file at the top level called typings.d.ts and put in it a reference to the packages you want to reference, eg: /// <reference types="@types/meteor" />

You may need to add the react types or they may get added automatically due to the jsx = react definition, but it seemed to run without any errors after I added the above.

The typescript docs suggest that the @types files should be included automatically, but I don't know why they're not. They weren't picked up when I removed the "types" above.

An alternative solution is to specify the types explicitly in the tsconfig.json file eg: ... "target": "es5", "types": [ "meteor" ]

Here's the relevant bit of the TS docs: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/tsconfig-json.html#types-typeroots-and-types This section starts by saying 'By default all visible “@types” packages are included in your compilation.' but goes on to explain how "typeRoots" and "types" can be configured in the tsconfig.json file.