Missing type declarations

[dominik-korsa]

Hi, my project uses TypeScript, but after importing this package I get the following error:

I can see that there are no .d.ts files in the build folder of the published package, even though the package is written in TypeScript. I haven´t been able to compile the code on my machine, so I cannot investigate this further.

Can you enable building the declarations?

[dominik-korsa]

I've managed to build the package, the problem was the script: "prepare": "npm run compile", which ran before installing packages, which were required to compile. I think this should be replaced with prepublishOnly.

Anyways, it appears that the definition files get build, but are excluded in the package.json.

"files": [
  "build",
  "index.mjs",
  "!*.d.ts"
],

Is there a reason for doing that?

[bcoe]

Is there a reason for doing that?

We've been choosing to not publish the types used in yargs' on modules, as it interferes with the types published on DefinitelyTyped -- this decision was mostly motivated by yargs itself, as the @types/yargs module has millions of users.

[kmturley]

Can you include documentation for use with TypeScript? seems like an incredibly common use-case

[tim-kernegger]

Changing import statement to require statement fixed it for me
import cliui from 'cliui' to const cliui = require('cliui')

[shadowspawn]

DefinitelyTyped does not have types for cliui, so it may be fine to include the generated type definitions for direct consumers of this package? There are DefinitelyTyped types for @types/yargs and @types/yargs-parser, but they do not appear to overlap with cliui.

To be clear, the main risk with publishing types in this package is breaking consumers of yargs, which is the biggest dependent on this package. So any insights on that risk are welcome.

[isaacs]

In my experience, the only correct way to move to TS from a DT-covered package is semver-major and delete the types from DT. Anything else is asking for headaches. DT is a decent stopgap for JS modules to allow them to be used within TS programs, but once it's written in TS, it's just unnecessary complexity and invariably falls out of sync.