I recently wrote a simple NodeJS console application using TypeScript. This is how I set it up.

Create a new folder for the project:

mkdir ts-sample
cd ts-sample

Initialize the NodeJS application:

npm init -y

The resulting package.json file contains the following:

{
  "name": "ts-sample",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

I manually change the main entry point from index.js to app.js.

Add TypeScript Support:

npm i -D typescript # Typescript compiles to plain JS  
npm i -D ts-node # ts-node to run typescript code without compiling to JS

The two packages were added as development dependencies:

  "devDependencies": {
    "ts-node": "^10.4.0",
    "typescript": "^4.5.4"
  }

Configure TypeScript

I manually added the tsconfig.json file (wsl touch tsconfig.json) with the following contents:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "module": "commonjs",
    "target": "es6",
    "lib": ["es6"],
    "outDir": "dist",
    "strict": true,
    "sourceMap": true
  },
  "exclude": [
    "node_modules"
  ] 
}

Setup NPM Scripts

I replaced the scripts section in the package.json file with the following:

  "scripts": {
    "start": "ts-node ./app.ts",
    "build": "tsc --build",
    "clean": "tsc --build --clean"
  },

Hello, World!

I added an app.ts TypeScript file to test that everything was setup correctly:

console.log('Hello, World!')

const args = process.argv

args.forEach((val, index) => {
  console.log(`${index}: ${val}`)
})

To run the application, I used the following command:

npm start

Setup Git

The last thing I did was set up Git. First, I added a .gitignore file:

# Create a .gitignore file
$url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gitignore/master/Node.gitignore"
$output = ".gitignore"
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -OutFile $output

Then initialized Git:

git init
git add .

You should see only these files being added:

git status

new file:   .gitignore
new file:   app.ts
new file:   package-lock.json
new file:   package.json
new file:   tsconfig.json

If all looks good, then commit the initial set of changes:

git commit -m "initial commit"