"emitDts": true for exporting handwritten declarations

Search Terms

emit .d.ts, handwritten declaration files, Project References, outDir

Suggestion

Introduce a tsconfig option "emitDts": true that will emit .d.ts source files into the outDir, taking precedence over any .js-generated .d.ts files.

Use Cases

1. Publishing handwritten declarations

Not everyone has their outDir inside their source directory. Not everyone publishes a combined set of source + generated files to npm. It's a common pattern to only publish your outDir.

The workaround is to have a separate script that copies your handwritten .d.ts into your outDir, overwriting any unwanted .js-generated declarations. This is workable but a bit cumbersome for such a common use-case.

2. Importing another project's outDir

Project References allow you to import types a from sibling project's source directory. If instead you switch to import from the sibling project's outDir (that is using "declaration": true), importing handwritten .d.ts fails because they are not emitted.

Why would people link to generated code? Because it helps simulate the experience of importing published code.

You can work-around lack of "emitDts": true by writing a build-script that copies the desired d.ts into the outdir. This works fine for tsc builds. However for IDEs (using the language service), it doesn't know about the build-script, and so always ignores the hand-written .d.ts and favours the .js-generated version. There is no work-around. Even if you overwrite the file in the outDir on disk with a build-script, the language service sees the .js-generated version.

Examples

This repo is an example of how importing handwritten .d.ts goes wrong today. Build it using tsc -b and observe...

• ./app-src/app.ts should error but it does not.
• ./app-src/app.ts incorrectly has access to hiddenBar because ./lib-src/main.d.ts is being ignored.

Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

• This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
• This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, etc.)
• This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

Related Issues

• Emit .d.ts for type-only usage of .d.ts files in a project #38146 asks for selective emit of handwritten declarations without a tsconfig option.

Credits: Max Heiber (@mheiber) Robin Ricard (@rricard) helped create this issue.