For the past couple of years, the main way to run scripts written in TypeScript has been with ts-node. However, now we have something faster and more modern - esbuild-runner or esr for short.
It's very fast and very easy to start using today.
💡Tip
esr makes it easy to run arbitrary code or tests without needing to build your whole project. It's a great way to improve your development workflow.
How to Use
In 2 mins or less, let me show you exactly how to use it:
- yarn init -y - create a new project
- yarn add -D esbuild esbuild-runner - add dependencies
- echo "console.log('hello world')" > hello-world.ts - create a script
- yarn esr hello-world.ts - run your script
After that, you should see the following output in your terminal:
yarn run v1.22.15
$ /esr-test/node_modules/.bin/esr hello-world.ts
hello world
Done in 0.23s
Lightning fast!
And with that new knowledge, you can now migrate your project's scripts over from Bash to TypeScript. Woohoo!