Run typescript build with tsconfig-paths using pm2

Question

I am trying to run the build (.js files) of typescript with the tsconfig-paths in production, I have no problem running typescript with paths. Just when running the build on production with pm2.

I have tried:

apps: [
{
  name: 'app',
  script: './dist/index.js',
  node_args: '-r ts-node/register -r tsconfig-paths/register',
},

],

Answer 1

TLDR: If as I assume you run info *the* common misunderstanding about tsconfig you may try:

{
  apps: [
  {
    name: 'app',
    script: './dist/index.js',
    node_args: '-r ts-node/register -r tsconfig-paths/register',
    env: {
      "TS_NODE_BASEURL": "./dist"
    }
  },
}

Explanation:

Typescript allows us to specify path aliases so that we don'y have to use ugly relative paths like ../../../../config. To use this feature typically you would have a tsconfig.json like this:

...
  "outDir": "./dist",
  "baseUrl": "./src", /* if your code sits in the /src directory */
   "paths": {
     "@/*": ["*"]
   }, 
...

Now you can do the following:

import config from "@/config";

It will compile without errors. During the compilation the requested modules are in the src directory. However:

$ node -r tsconfig-paths/register dist/index.js
Failure! Cannot find module '@/config'

Why is that? Because at runtime config no longer sits inside ./src but instead can be found in ./dist.

So how do we handle this? Fortunately tsconfig-paths allows us to override baseUrl with TS_NODE_BASEURL env:

$ TS_NODE_BASEURL=./dist node -r tsconfig-paths/register dist/index.js
Success!