missing "dist" directory in aurelia vs2015 typescript skeleton

Question

I have downloaded the Aurelia VS2015 skeleton for typescript but am unable to run the Aurelia Navigation app in IIS Express. The only change I've made to the skeleton is to add "webroot": "wwwroot", to the top level of project.json.

But the app is trying to load "dist/main.js" which has two problems: 1) there is no "dist" directory under "wwwroot" (where it would need to be for IIS Express to find it) nor is there a "dist" directory anywhere else. The type script files are being compiled to the "src" directory which is sibling to the wwwroot directory and also contains the .ts and .map files which don't belong under wwwroot.

Does anyone know how to fix this issue or where I can find sufficient information to figure it out myself?

Thanks!

Answer 1

great question.

In the Visual Studio TypeScript skeleton we supply a configuration option in the tsconfig.json (https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton-navigation/blob/master/skeleton-typescript-asp.net5/src/skeleton-navigation-typescript-vs/tsconfig.json#L3) to not compile on save.

This should work across editors. If it is not picking up the tsconfig.json you could have a few other problems in Visual Studio that are outside of this question.

The other part of the question is about the dist folder - the dist folder gets created as you mentioned when you run gulp build or gulp watch (which runs gulp build under the covers)

If you want to have that be a part of your normal workflow you can follow these steps -

1. Open Visual Studio, click View at the top, Other Windows, and click Task Runner Explorer
2. You should see a list of the gulp tasks on the left. Right click watch and select bindings > project open

This will keep gulp watch running in the background whenever you have Visual Studio open and are working on the project.