How to put .env and other filed in dist folder while building project in node?

Question

I am using Typescript in my node project and this my tsconfig -

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "module": "commonjs",
        "esModuleInterop": true,
        "target": "es6",
        "noImplicitAny": true,
        "moduleResolution": "node",
        "sourceMap": true,
        "outDir": "dist/application",
        "baseUrl": "./src",
        "paths": {
            "*": [
                "node_modules/*",
                "src/shared/types/*"
            ]
        }    
    },
    "include": [
        "src/**/*"
    ],
    "exclude": [
        "node_modules"
    ],
    "typedocOptions": {
        "mode": "modules",
        "out": "docs"
    }
}

This is my application folder structure -

.
├── dist
│   └── application
│       ├── app.js
│       ├── app.js.map
│       ├── modules
│       └── shared
├── environments
│   └── .env.development
├── node_modules
├── nodemon.json
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
├── security
│   ├── domain.crt
│   └── domain.key
├── src
│   ├── app.ts
│   ├── modules
│   │   ├── chat
│   │   ├── main-controller.ts
│   │   └── sso
│   └── shared
│       ├── constants
│       ├── models
│       ├── types
│       └── utils
├── tsconfig.json
└── typedoc.json

After compilation, Typescript compiler puts everything in.dist/application.

While development, my main file (app.ts) was in./src/app.ts. In this app.ts file, I was trying to read.env.development file in./src/app.ts. this is how I was reading this file in app.ts -

config({ path: resolve(Utils.getAppRoot(), "../environments/.env.development") });

but at runtime system is not able to resolve the path for.env file, since TS compiler is putting app.ts code in./dist/application/app.js, and Node is not able to find the path of.env file with respect to the current root path.

To resolve this issue, I need to copy my all the configuration/static files (here, .env file) into./dist folder at the time of compilation.

Can someone help me to set-up the ts-config so that these static files get copied to./dist/folder at the time of compilation?

Answer 1

I don't think you can do this using the TypeScript compiler. Instead, I recommend using NPM scripts for doing this. You can define a separate build task for each destination environment. For example, you can define build-dev task to build the project for the development environment as follows.

"build-dev": "cp .env.development ./dist/.env && tsc"

You can have a script for each environment and copy the proper .env file to the dist folder. Then, you can run these tasks using the NPM run command, for example:

npm run build-dev

Answer 2

The previous answer is correct with your current project structure. If you'd like to include a.env file with your TSC build you could put a.env file in the root of your project and change your tsconfig.json file to look like this

{
  "compilerOptions": {
  /* Basic Options */
  "incremental": true /* Enable incremental compilation */,
  "target": "es6" /* Specify ECMAScript target version: 'ES3' (default), 'ES5', 'ES2015', 'ES2016', 'ES2017', 'ES2018', 'ES2019', 'ES2020', or 'ESNEXT'. */,
  "module": "commonjs" /* Specify module code generation: 'none', 'commonjs', 'amd', 'system', 'umd', 'es2015', 'es2020', or 'ESNext'. */,
  "allowJs": true /* Allow javascript files to be compiled. */,
  "checkJs": false /* Report errors in .js files. */,
  "outDir": "./dist" /* Redirect output structure to the directory. */,
  "strict": true /* Enable all strict type-checking options. */,
  "alwaysStrict": true ,
  "rootDirs": [
    "./src",
    "./public",
    "./db"
  ] ,
  "typeRoots": [
    "@types",
    "./node_modules/@types"
  ] ,
  "esModuleInterop": true ,
  "inlineSourceMap": true ,
  "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true 
},
  "include": [ "./.env", "./src", "./public"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules", "test", "e2e"]
}