The library in focus here is the ts-express-cli; A minimal TypeScript express server project generator, which I released a couple of weeks ago. My love for TypeScript is never hidden and I always use it wherever possible.

The problem

It’s common knowledge it is very easy and fast to experiment with ideas using JS/TS than other languages, which I do a lot. Every time I setup an express server I must include the express-types, typescript, ts-types etc to configure express to work well with TypeScript.

This repetitive tasks is almost always the same for all projects expect the few specific libraries I must include for some special projects. The few tools I found online either does not use express to generate the server or it included a lot of libraries for me out of the box which I don’t need and will not use ever.

So I decided to create the ts-express-cli which only contains the core basic libraries need to get it running.

The Solution

I wish a could say it took me longer to complete it but it only took me about an hour or two to complete the whole development. I built it on top of a couple of libraries:

• Chalk: To get colorful displays in the console.
• figlet: to get the big & bright ts-express-cli banner on the console.
• Commander: to define it as a command on the computer.
• fs-extra: to create files and directory on the computer.
• prompts: to take input from the user on the terminal for the project name, author and license.

The pull code for the library is available on GitHub https://github.com/idawud/ts-express-cli

Usage

To install it run npm i -g ts-express-cli then run ts-express-cli on your terminal to create project.

This will create a hello world index route in src/app.ts, .gitignore, tsconfig.json, package.json and tslint.json. You will only have to run npm install to install the dependencies.

The package.json contains a start, build and dev script. The build script transpile the Typescript into JavaScript es6 in a dist/ directory. The start script builds and run the code while the dev script runs it on nodemon which restart every time a file change occurs typically during development.

Conclusion

This simple tools has saved me a lot of time start new TS projects. In the first week of publishing it, it about 200 downloads without me advertising it to any developer group or persons. This just tells me how much others needed a tool like.