Background

Since TypeScript 2.2, developers have been able to write language service plugins to enrich the TypeScript development experience. However, as smooth as these plugins might make development, the same did not extend to the plugin installation process.

There are a few excellent TypeScript plugins out there, each of which fine-tunes your editor to add support for some specific tools. Most of the current plugins seem to fall into the “embedded language” category, like:

TypeScript Plugins have a lot of potential, but currently, there seems to be only a handful of projects which take advantage of this powerful tool.

My hope is that ts-plugin can help change that, by allowing developers to manage their TypeScript plugins as easily as they manage project dependencies with NPM.

That’s all there is to it!

In the background, ts-plugin will figure out which Node package you’re trying to install, install it as a devDependency, and add it to the plugins section of your tsconfig.json or jsconfig.json file.

One of the cool things about ts-plugin is that it automatically matches a plugin name, like styled or graphql, to the correct package on NPM, in this case typescript-styled-plugin or ts-graphql-plugin.

How does that work? Given a name, styled, it will check the NPM registry for the existence of typescript-plugin-styled | typescript-styled-plugin | ts-plugin-styled | ts-styled-plugin.

It’s just as easy as you’d expect. This command will uninstall the Node package and remove it from the plugins section of your config file.

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