Suggestion

🔍 Search Terms

List of keywords you searched for before creating this issue. Write them down here so that others can find this suggestion more easily and help provide feedback.

• exclude cli

✅ Viability 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, new syntax sugar for JS, etc.)
• This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

⭐ Suggestion

I would like to be able to specify the exclude option which exists in tsconfig.json as a command line option.

📃 Motivating Example

The tsc command line tool now supports the --exclude option. This option behaves the same as the "exclude": [] option in tsconfig.json.

💻 Use Cases

In my experienct a TypeScript project currently typically needs 3 files (excluding actual code);

tsconfig.json for type checking, including tests etc.:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "declaration": true,
    "noEmit": true,
    // … Add more options as desired
  }
}

tsconfig.build.json for building a project, excluding tests etc. (this can be named however you like)

{
  "extends": "./tsconfig.json",
  // The real exclude patterns are project specific.
  "exclude": ["__tests__", "*.test.ts", "*.spec.js"],
  "compilerOptions": {
    // Actually do emit when building.
    "noEmit": false
  }
}

package.json including a prepack script for building the project:

{
  "scripts": {
    "prepack": "tsc -P tsconfig.build.json"
  }
}

Introducing the --exclude command line option removes the need for a custom build tsconfig. This unclutters the project root by removing the need for a specific tsconfig file only for building. So basically the following changes can be made:

tsconfig.build.json is deleted:

- {
-   "extends": "./tsconfig.json",
-   // The real exclude patterns are project specific.
-   "exclude": ["__tests__", "*.test.ts", "*.spec.js"],
-   "compilerOptions": {
-     // Actually do emit when building.
-     "noEmit": false
-   }
- }

package.json now uses the tsconfig.json file, but specifies the exclude pattern:

  {
   "scripts": {
-     "prepack": "tsc -P tsconfig.build.json"
+     "prepack": "tsc --noEmit false --exclude '__tests__' --exclude '*.test.ts' --exclude '*.spec.js'"
    }
  }