Typescript error "Cannot write file ... because it would overwrite input file."

Question

In my Typescript 2.2.1 project in Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, I am getting hundreds of errors in the error list like:

Cannot write file 'C:/{{my-project}}/node_modules/buffer-shims/index.js' because it would overwrite input file.

It looks like this all the time. It doesn't actually prevent building, and everything works just fine, but the error list is distracting and difficult to locate "real" errors when they occur.

Here is my tsconfig.json file

{
  "compileOnSave": true,
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "removeComments": true,
    "sourceMap": true,
    "target": "ES5",
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "strictNullChecks": true,
    "allowUnreachableCode": false,
    "allowUnusedLabels": false,
    "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": true,
    "noImplicitReturns": true,
    "noImplicitThis": true,
    "noUnusedLocals": true,
    "noUnusedParameters": true,

    "typeRoots": [],
    "types": [] //Explicitly specify an empty array so that the TS2 @types modules are not acquired since we aren't ready for them yet.
  },
  "exclude": ["node_modules"]
}

How can I get rid of all these errors?

Answer 1

It seems like this issue was fixed for me by updating to Typescript 2.3.x

Also, using Visual Studio 2017 was a big improvement as well. I highly recommend that you make both of these updates though.