Tsconfig.json does not resolve paths with dashes "-" in folder name

[cbdeveloper]

Bug Report

🔎 Search Terms

tsconfig.json, path, resolve, include, exclude, dash

🕗 Version & Regression Information

[email protected] installed globally on VSCode Windows 10.

⏯ Playground Link

Not necessary.

💻 Code

I work with a monorepo structure and some packages are installed in more than one folder. I don't want to skipLibCheck, because I need my own src/*.d.ts files to be checked. But at the same time, if I allow all node_modules to be checked on the tsc call, I'll get many conflicts, because a lot of library types will be declared in more than one place. So, this is what I always do:

tsconfig.json

// ...
"exclude": [
    "node_modules",
    "server/node_modules",
    "server-jobs/node_modules",    // THIS DOES NOT WORK
    "server_jobs/node_modules",    // THIS WORKS
    "public"
  ]

🙁 Actual behavior

When I added the server-jobs/node_modules folder, I started getting conflict errors for packages inside server-jobs/node_modules, which made no sense, because they were supposed to be excluded.

I tried tweaking my code, and experimented with some different include/exclude patterns. Nothing seemed to work. Until I though it could be related to the folder name, because of the dash "-" character. Since the server folder wasn't triggering any errors.

Then I changed it to server_jobs, with an underscore "_" and everything went back to normal. No more conflict errors.

I didn't find anything in the documentation for it.

https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig#exclude

Is this a known issue? Is it supposed to behave like that?

🙂 Expected behavior

I expected for the tsc to parse folder names with dashes "-" without any issues, or at least for it to give me a heads up with a warning telling me that that folder name is not allowed.

[minestarks]

This is surprising. I don't think dashes are the problem here (folders with dashes in their name work fine on other projects). Perhaps the folder name had a different type of dash (e.g. —) copy-and-pasted from somewhere? Perhaps other files were referencing the files under server-jobs?

[RyanCavanaugh]

Agree with Mine, it's implausible that dashes are the problem here; react-router exists and we would immediately hear about it if that didn't work. A more complete sample that reproduces the problem is needed.

[cbdeveloper]

Hey everyone,

Thank you all for the feedback. Just found out that the errors are still happening with the name server_jobs. The reason that they were gone initially is because I was deleting its node_modules before renaming (to speed up the rename operation). Of course the errors would be gone in that case. So it has nothing to do with the dashes - in the folder names. Sorry for the confusion.

I'm still finding it weird, though. Why would Typescript care for conflicts inside node_modules folders when they are being excluded? I can't use skipLibCheck because my project types are in some src/*.d.ts files that I do want to be checked. AFAIK, it's not possible to skipLibCheck just for node_modules, or is it?

This is now off-topic, but would be happy to hear your thoughts.

I'll close the issue since it's not about folder names at all.

This is my full tsconfig.json

// REFERENCE
// https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "allowJs": true,
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "isolatedModules": true,
    "jsx": "react",
    "module": "CommonJS",
    "moduleResolution": "Node",
    "noEmit": true,
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "noImplicitReturns": true,
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    // "skipLibCheck": true,
    "strictNullChecks": true,
    "target": "ESNext",
    "paths": {
      "@app/*":    ["./app/*"],
      "@common/*": ["./common/*"]
    }
  },
  "ts-node": {
    "files": true     // Load files, include and exclude from tsconfig.json on startup
  },
  "include": [
    "app/**/*",
    "common/**/*",
    "server/src/**/*",
    "server_jobs/src/**/*",
    "scripts/**/*"
  ],
  "exclude": [
    "node_modules",
    "server/node_modules",
    "server/dist_app",
    "server/dist_common",
    "server/dist_service",
    "server/public",
    "server_jobs/node_modules",
    "server_jobs/dist_common",
    "server_jobs/dist_service",
    "public"
  ]
}

These are the errors I'm getting:

[cbdeveloper]

After further research and debug, I found out that the errors were being caused by a version difference between the firebase-admin that was installed on the project root as a devDependency and the firebase-admin installed on the server_jobs folder as a dependency.

Since the server_jobs folder was the most recent one, it had a more recent version of that package. After updating all to the same version, the errors went away.

But I still find it weird that those errors were caught by tsc, given the fact that all node_modules were excluded.

[RyanCavanaugh]

exclude is only a filter on include; it doesn't change whether files can get imported into your program, or how they behave once present.

See also #30511

[l-jonasiak]

@cbdeveloper It's been a while since this issue was last answered. Have you found a solution?