TypeScript: Use absolute file paths in error messages

I’ve released a very simple drop-in replacement tsc wrapper, tsc-absolute, that fixes this problem. It’s potentially preferable to other solutions (e.g. piping through awk/sed) as it generally keeps your npm scripts simpler, is portable across platforms, and ensures things like exit codes and signals are handled correctly. To install, it’s as simple as:

1. Run npm install --save-dev tsc-absolute.
2. Replace tsc with tsc-absolute in your scripts.

This is really useful in monorepo setups for developer experience. It allows you to click to files in the terminal reliably, as well as match on filenames in CI.

The README also includes a recommended GitHub problem matcher configuration, that I think catches the logs better (and supports the kinds of logs generated by monorepo tools like npm workspaces / yarn / nx / turborepo).

This is issue that exhibits for monorepos in IDEs, however also automatic recognition of file errors in GitHub Actions. Having the ability to switch to absolute paths… Either by default, through TSConfig, or through environment variable, would be great thing.

I have also though about this. At first this seems like the way to go (for any CLI tool that outputs file paths). However, TypeScript doesn’t just output file paths. It outputs path:line:column. E.g. ../index.ts:123:42. Various tools, such as VSCode, can handle this format to open text files on the specified line and column.

I work with monorepos and vscode almost exclusively. I can never click to navigate to the errored file directly when working with TypeScript. This option would help productivity in my and similar use-cases.

The primary use-case for myself and several other users in this thread is having support for Github Actions’ problemMatcher functionality, which uses a regex to extract error file paths, severity levels, and messages from CI runs and display them inline in Pull Request diffs. Extracted file paths must either be absolute, or relative to where the root of the repository is checked out within the CI environment.

The link solution @mizdra suggested is an elegant solution for the local development, but most likely would not work in a portable or intuitive way with CI (for example, you’d probably have to write your own forked problemMatcher regex for filepath extraction rather than just being able to leverage the built-in functionality from actions/setup-node, and even that assumes that the problemMatchers run on console output before it’s been stripped of escape sequences).

Adding absolute path output in tsc error messages, combined with the work I’ve done in yarn@v3.4.0 to enable unprefixed output, would give tsc users automatic error recognition when tsc is used within a Github Actions workflow in a yarn monorepo.

Other ideas to solve the problem:

How about outputting relative paths that are hyperlinked to absolute paths instead of absolute paths? That is, have tsc output logs like this

$ printf '\e]8;;file:///Users/mizdra/src/github.com/mizdra/eslint-interactive/src/index.ts\e\src/index.ts\e]8;;\e\e]8;;\e\e\e]n'

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9639995/220143165-5147572d-caf7-4c2d-94ac-389dc5d10342.mov

Many modern terminals seem to support this feature.

• https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda

I think this approach would provide clickable paths without annoying the user with the length of the paths output.

I’ve got my own, similar, wrapper script to tsc that we’re using at our organization as a workaround. However, it’s becoming such a common use case that I would love it if the Typescript team could weigh in here. Previously, the team’s position was that they did not plan to allow for an additional option for absolute path output from tsc.

Given it has been almost 7 years since that issue was closed and JavaScript development practices & tooling have undergone a significant shift towards monorepo-style development patterns, I would love to see this decision revisited.

FYI: Combining pipe-if-ci with reviewdog will work around the issue of GitHub Annotations not displaying. I think this will help you.

• More info: https://github.com/mizdra/node-pipe-if-ci#use-cases-github-annotations

Another possibility would be to add mono-repo to TypeScript itself. If it’s possible to type check multiple projects in one command, not only could TypeScript print relative paths properly, but it could share the document registry internally, which would enhance a performance. E.g.:

tsc --project './packages/*' --project './examples/*'

If anyone is looking for a hack to get things working in GitHub actions:

tsc --pretty false | sed -E "s#^.+\(.+\): error TS.+\$#$PWD/\0#"

It just prepends $PWD to lines formatted like errors.