Publish .d.ts TypeScript declaration files for plugins

[cpcallen]

Category

• Plugins

Component

All—at least all that are written in TypeScript—most probably via modifications to dev-scripts.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Users in the forum report issues with their editors and/or builds complaining about missing type declarations.

Describe the solution you'd like

For the plugins that are built from TypeScript source, we should generate a dist/index.d.ts file and ensure it is included in the published NPM package.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• We could… just not. But it seems like it should be easy to do and be helpful to developers using plugins from TypeScript.
• On the other hand we could autogenerate .d.ts files for TS-sourced plugins and hand roll .d.ts files or try to use tsickle to translate Closure type declarations for those that are still written in JS—but that seems like a lot of work that might better be spent on porting those plugins to TypeScript.

Additional context

It's not immediately obvious whether this can be done merely by modifying plugins/dev-scripts/config/webpack.config.js or whether we will additionally have to update all of the plugins/*/tsconfig.json files (plus dev-create/templates/typescript-*/template/tsconfig.json).

[laurensvalk]

This would be very useful.

I wonder if it is sufficient to set "declaration": true for the tsconfig.json files of the ts-based plugins. With the following patch, running build will produce the d.ts files in the src output.

diff --git a/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/package.json b/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/package.json
index 06f56f7d..02e6f13e 100644
--- a/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/package.json
+++ b/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/package.json
@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@
   "main": "./dist/index.js",
   "module": "./src/index.js",
   "unpkg": "./dist/index.js",
+  "types": "./src/index.d.ts",
   "author": "Blockly Team",
   "keywords": [
     "blockly",
diff --git a/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/tsconfig.json b/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/tsconfig.json
index 6e26e186..42844cb6 100644
--- a/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/tsconfig.json
+++ b/plugins/block-shareable-procedures/tsconfig.json
@@ -5,7 +5,8 @@
     "allowJs": true,
     "sourceMap": true,
     "lib": ["es6", "dom"],
-    "moduleResolution": "node"
+    "moduleResolution": "node",
+    "declaration": true,
   },
   "include": [
     "src", "test"

cd plugins/block-shareable-procedures
npm run build

[BeksOmega]

I discussed this briefly with Maribeth last Thursday after seeing the forum post. We decided to split this into individual issues for osd, but I didn't follow up with it because I was doing docs Friday.

So I'm going to close this issue and split it up by plugin.

[BeksOmega]

Added a comment to #1871 for tracking dev-create updates.