It can be tricky to work with React and TypeScript and find the right answers, so we’ve put together the best practices and examples to clear your doubts.

React and TypeScript are two awesome technologies used by a lot of developers these days. Knowing how to do things can get tricky, and sometimes it’s hard to find the right answer. Not to worry. We’ve put together the best practices along with examples to clarify any doubts you may have.

Let’s dive in!

How React and TypeScript Work Together

Before we begin, let’s revisit how React and TypeScript work together. React is a “JavaScript library for building user interfaces”, while TypeScript is a “typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.” By using them together, we essentially build our UIs using a typed version of JavaScript.

The reason you might use them together would be to get the benefits of a statically typed language (TypeScript) for your UI. This means more safety and fewer bugs shipping to the front end.

Does TypeScript Compile My React Code?

A common question that’s always good to review is whether TypeScript compiles your React code. The way TypeScript works is similar to this interaction:

TS: “Hey, is this all your UI code?”

React: “Yup!”

TS: “Cool! I’m going to compile it and make sure you didn’t miss anything.”

React: “Sounds good to me!”

So the answer is yes, it does! But later, when we cover the tsconfig.json settings, most of the time you’ll want to use "noEmit": true. What this means is TypeScript will not emit JavaScript out after compilation. This is because typically, we’re just utilizing TypeScript to do our type-checking.

The output is handled, in a CRA setting, by react-scripts. We run yarn build and react-scripts bundles the output for production.

To recap, TypeScript compiles your React code to type-check your code. It doesn’t emit any JavaScript output (in most scenarios). The output is still similar to a non-TypeScript React project.

Can TypeScript Work with React and webpack?

Yes, TypeScript can work with React and webpack. Lucky for you, the webpack documentation has a guide on that.

Hopefully, that gives you a gentle refresher on how the two work together. Now, on to best practices!

Best Practices

We’ve researched the most common questions and put together this handy list of the most common use cases for React with TypeScript. This way, you can use this article as a reference in your own projects.

Configuration

One of the least fun, yet most important parts of development is configuration. How can we set things up in the shortest amount of time that will provide maximum efficiency and productivity? We’ll discuss project setup including:

• tsconfig.json
• ESLint
• Prettier
• VS Code extensions and settings.

Project Setup

The quickest way to start a React/TypeScript app is by using create-react-app with the TypeScript template. You can do this by running:

npx create-react-app my-app --template typescript

This will get you the bare minimum to start writing React with TypeScript. A few noticeable differences are:

• the .tsx file extension
• the tsconfig.json
• the react-app-env.d.ts

The tsx is for “TypeScript JSX”. The tsconfig.json is the TypeScript configuration file, which has some defaults set. The react-app-env.d.ts references the types of react-scripts, and helps with things like allowing for SVG imports.

#typescript #react #javascript #web-development