tsc that skips typechecking but still fails on syntax errors.

Sometimes you want to use TypeScript, but you're migrating a legacy project. So you have type errors. Maybe not everyone on your team is an expert at type annotations yet. Or maybe you renamed some old .js files to .ts so you can add annotations slowly over time, and you don't want to spam any all over the place.

You want to tsc your code, and you want it to fail on syntax errors. (const foo = = this is wrong;) But you don't want it to fail on semantic errors.

This is a quick, 1 hour hack to write a tsc alternative that compiles your code just like tsc but skips typechecking.

Usage

Install this module alongside the version of "typescript" you want to use.

npm install typescript-transpile-only
npm install typescript

Run tsc-transpile-only instead of tsc. For example:

tsc-transpile-only --project .

Caveats

No tests; use it at your own risk. Or look at the code; it's tiny.

Does not support --build, --help, --version, or --all flags.
The only one that makes sense in this context is --build, but you can easily workaround this by invoking tsc-transpile-only multiple times.

Exit codes are valid but don't exactly match tsc's behavior. tsc uses different non-zero error codes depending on the reason for failure. We use exit code 1 for all failures; 0 for success. (no syntax errors)

Bugs / Questions / Suggestions

Please open an issue on Github.