lib.dom.d.ts seems to not be referenced when any file in the compilation contains no-default-lib=true triple slash

🔎 Search Terms

no-default-lib lib dom ignored cannot resolve HTMLElement paths

🕗 Version & Regression Information

This is an unintuitive error that took me a long time to pin down.

⏯ Playground Link

No response

💻 Code

Given the following 3 files:

worker.d.ts

/// <reference no-default-lib="true"/>
/// <reference lib="webworker" />
/// <reference lib="esnext" />

export declare class MyWorker {}

library.d.ts

import type { MyWorker } from "./worker";

export interface Type1 {
  worker: MyWorker;
}

app.d.ts

interface App {
  prop: HTMLElement;
}

tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "lib": [ "ES2020", "DOM" ],
  },
}

🙁 Actual behavior

An error occurs in the app.d.ts file

Cannot find name 'HTMLElement'.ts(2304)

🙂 Expected behavior

Any of the following:

• A better error message inside the app.d.ts file
• an error in the tsconfig
• a better error message when using --traceResolution

Suggesting a reason for why lib: [ "DOM" ] in the tsconfig file is ignored.

Its also possible this is incorrect behaviour, however the docs say document that the use case for no-default-lib is for files that do not include the default library, rather than those (like in my case) that wanted to ignore the default libraries included via the tsconfig.json.

Additional information about the issue

This bug is really here as a helpful hint in case anyone else runs into this same issue. Its particularly difficult to debug the issue, as app.d.ts has no references to anything. In my real project, the situation is a bit more complicated, and it took me a long time to figure out that this was the issue.

As a side note, what is the best way to do typings for a web worker file within an existing project? At the moment, I'll be adding a separate tsconfig file for the specific web worker, and exclude that file from the main tsconfig, EDIT: This doesn't actually work, as each separate tsconfig file cannot include files from the other when composite is true.