tsconfig-flags-to-prevent-common-errors.md

tsconfig flags to prevent common errors

Even thought it’s ostensibly just a compiler, TypeScript also includes a bunch of flags that helps prevent common code errors. I end up reusing these in most TypeScript projects I work on, so I figured I’d just document them here for future reference.

{
  "strict": true,
  "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": true,
  "noImplicitOverride": true,
  "noImplicitReturns": true,
  "noUncheckedIndexedAccess": true,
  "noUnusedLocals": true,
  "noUnusedParameters": true,
  "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
  "verbatimModuleSyntax": true
}

Here’s a short explanation of what each flag does

• strict enables a bunch of other flags; enabling this is really the bare minimum.
  • alwaysStrict uses strict mode emits "use strict" in each file.
  • noImplicitAny raises an error if lack of type annotations would lead it to infer any.
  • noImplitictThis raises an error if a reference to this has an inferred any type.
  • strictBindCallApply correctly types the bind, call and apply methods on functions; otherwise, they accept and return any.
  • strictFunctionTypes treats function arguments as contravariant rather than bivariant.
  • strictNullChecks treats undefined and null as their own distinct types, forbidding e.g. accessing a property of a type that might be undefined.
  • strictPropertyInitialization raises an error when a class property that isn’t optional is not set by default or in the constructor.
  • useUnknownInCatchVariables uses unknown rather than any as the type of the exception in a catch clause.
• noFallthroughCasesInSwitch forces non-empty cases in switch statements to end with a break or return.
• noImplicitOverride raises an error if a subclass overrides a method in a superclass without being annotated with override.
• noImplicitReturns raises an error if only some code paths in a function return a value.
• noUncheckedIndexAccess uses a union with undefined when accessing values of objects with unknown keys, such as objects that act as indexes or arrays of unknown length. This can be somewhat annoying, since you now need to check for undefined every time, but it’s safer.
• noUnusedLocals raises an error when a local variable is declared but never used; the error can be suppressed by prefixing the variable name with an underscore.
• noUnusedParameters raises an error when a function parameter is declared but never used; the error can be suppressed by prefixing the variable name with an underscore.
• forceConsistentCasingInFileNames raises an error if the casing of an import specifier (”foo.js”) differs from the file on disk (Foo.js).
• verbatimModuleSyntax ensures that type-only imports are explicitly annotated as such (since they’re erased at runtime, they won’t behave the same as value imports if the module causes side effects). Replaces importsNotUsedAsValues.