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typescriptarchitecturedependencies

Typescript prevent imports from certain directory in project

I wonder if there is a way to prevent all files in a certain scope from importing any file from a different second scope. Example:

Given this project structure:

project/
├── node_modules/
├── test/
├── src/
│   ├── domain/
│   │   ├── SomeModelClass.ts
│   ├── application/
│   │   ├── SomeApplicationConcern.ts
│   ├── database/
│   │   ├── SomeRepository.ts
├── tsconfig.json
└── tslint.json

I would like to enforce at least some of these rules:

  • SomeApplicationConcern can import code from anywhere.
  • SomeRepository can not import code from application
  • SomeModelClass can not import code from neither application nor domain.

Can it be achieved somehow using nested tsconfig.json files?
Can it be achieved using some fancy tslint rules?

I have no clue if anything like this is possible. I would like to get a compilation error (or tslint error, which is set to error severity in my project) if a forbidden dependency is detected.

Solution

  • A few ideas based on some quick online research:

    1. good-fences is a dedicated tool to restrict imports in a TypeScript project. You'd have to add it to your build process as a separate step.
    2. Compile your TypeScript code with module set to es6 (to a separate output directory if you need a different module setting to generate the code you actually run) and then run ESLint with the no-restricted-imports rule on the output.
    3. Set up both your runtime environment and your tsconfig.json so that you can use only non-relative imports, and then use the no-relative-imports rule from tslint-microsoft-contrib. However, there was talk of deprecating no-relative-imports.
    4. Write your own TSLint-based reimplementation of ESLint's no-restricted-imports and contribute it to tslint-eslint-rules.