Project References Wildcards

🔍 Search Terms

"project references" "glob" "wildcard" "repetitive" "monorepo"

✅ Viability Checklist

• 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 our Design Goals: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Design-Goals

⭐ Suggestion

Project References currently have to be written out explicitly. It would be super nice if we could use a wildcard/glob like this, where I could simply have all of my tsconfig.json files look like this:

{
  "extends": ["../../../tsconfig.base.json"],
  "references": [{"path": "../../libs/*"}]
}

Or, even something like this:

{
  "extends": ["../../../tsconfig.base.json"],
  "references": [{"path": "../../libs/*/tsconfig.build.json"}]
}

We can discuss below whether supporting globstars (**) is prudent or not.

📃 Motivating Example

I've got a project with 8 libs and 3 apps using project references. It follows this basic structure:

tsconfig.base.json
workspaces/
  apps/
    app-1/
      tsconfig.json
    app-2/
      tsconfig.json
    .../
  libs/
    lib-1/
      tsconfig.json
    lib-2/
      tsconfig.json
    .../

There's a little more complexity, but that's the basic idea. However, I have a ton of repetition between all my tsconfig.json files that basically all look like this:

{
  "extends": ["../../../tsconfig.base.json"],
  "references": [
    {
      "path": "../../libs/lib-1"
    },
    {
      "path": "../../libs/lib-2"
    },
    // ...
  ]
}

I can't rely on the extends functionality from tsconfig.base.json because of things like @RyanCavanaugh's explanation here: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/27098#issuecomment-494161387.

💻 Use Cases

1. What do you want to use this for?

• A monorepo with a number of shared libraries and apps

2. What shortcomings exist with current approaches?

• Lots of repetition of lengthy amounts of JSON

3. What workarounds are you using in the meantime?

• Specifying each lib in the "references" portion for every single app/lib that needs to be able to import shared libraries.

Start with the tsconfig.json examples and the linked discussions about project-reference inheritance. Define the supported wildcard and globstar forms, including how paths resolve in the monorepo layout, then verify that wildcard references work without changing existing explicit references.