esbuild-plugin-ts-references

esbuild plugin for Typescript references.

Rationale

A common approach for monorepos is yarn/npm/pnpm workspaces + typescript references.

While it works in VSCode and using tsc --build, esbuild doesn't resolve such references automatically. The feature request to add support for it was closed as it is not in the scope of the bundler and creation of a plugin was suggested.

This is the plugin.

Installation

npm install --save-dev esbuild-plugin-ts-references

Usage

Define plugin in the plugins section of esbuild config like this:

const esbuild = require('esbuild');
const tsReferences = require('esbuild-plugin-ts-references');

esbuild.build({
  // ...
  plugins: [tsReferences]
});

Implementation details

Currently the algorithm to resolve the references is very simple (but it works for me):

• Find the closest tsconfig.json to the build target
• Resolve package.json and tsconfig.json of references
• Map package name from package.json to rootDir from tsconfig.json
• Profit!