Ts-node: Specify a different tsconfig when launching debugger in VS Code

[Zlatkovsky]

Note sure if it's a feature gap or a documentation bug -- but I have been unable to use VS Code debugging for my use case.

If I run tsnode on the commandline or from script in package.json, it works beautifully:

"precompile": "ts-node --project ../../scripts/tsconfig.json scripts/precompile.ts

However, when I tried to put it into a VS Code launch config, such as this:

    {
      "type": "node",
      "request": "launch",
      "name": "Editor precompile script",
      "runtimeArgs": ["-r", "ts-node/register"],
      "args": ["--project", "../../scripts/tsconfig.json", "scripts/precompile.ts"],
    },

It fails with

C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.exe: bad option: --project ../../scripts/tsconfig.json

On the other hand, if I omit the --project part and only have

      "args": ["scripts/precompile.ts"],

then the command fails with the same error that I would get if I omitted --project on the commandline. The error is

import fs from 'fs-extra';
       ^^
SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier

and results from my top-level tsconfig.json targeting a different type of module -- which is why I created the separate tsconfig in the first place, for tsnode's usage.

Is there any way to pipe this through to the VSCode launch config?

Thanks!

[blakeembrey]

You need to use environment variables for this. Node.js doesn't understand ts-node arguments directly, so we have a "backdoor" via environment variables. In VS Code, you can set environment variables through the launch.json. There's some (not great) documentation in https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/debugging, I think it should look something like: "env": { "TS_NODE_PROJECT": "path-here" } (not tested).

[Zlatkovsky]

Yep, that worked beautifully! Thanks, @blakeembrey! Added PR #738 to make a note of this in the readme, if you think that would be useful to have there.