TypeScript Vue Starter

This quick start guide will teach you how to get TypeScript and Vue working together. This guide is flexible enough that any steps here can be used to integrate TypeScript into an existing Vue project.

Initialize your project

Let's create a new package.

mkdir typescript-vue-tutorial
cd typescript-vue-tutorial

Next, we'll scaffold our project in the following way:

typescript-vue-tutorial/
├─ dist/
└─ src/
   └─ components/

TypeScript files will start out in your src folder, run through the TypeScript compiler, then webpack, and end up in a bundle.js file in dist. Any components that we write will go in the src/components folder.

Let's scaffold this out:

mkdir src
cd src
mkdir components
cd ..

Webpack will eventually generate the dist directory for us.

Initialize the project

Now we'll turn this folder into an npm package.

npm init

You'll be given a series of prompts. You can use the defaults except for your entry point. You can always go back and change these in the package.json file that's been generated for you.

Install our dependencies

We'll be using a custom repository that uses experimental declarations for Vue. These declarations are currently maintained on a fork of Vue, but may be part of the main repo in the near future.

npm install https://github.com/DanielRosenwasser/vue#540a38fb21adb7a7bc394c65e23e6cffb36cd867

Next, ensure TypeScript, Webpack and the necessary loaders are installed.

npm install --save-dev typescript webpack ts-loader css-loader vue-loader vue-template-compiler@2.2.1

Webpack is a tool that will bundle your code and optionally all of its dependencies into a single .js file. While you don't need to use a bundler like Webpack or Browserify, these tools will allow us to use .vue files which we'll cover in a bit.

We've locked onto version 2.2.1 of the vue-template-compiler so that it operates smoothly with our fork of Vue.

We didn't need to add .d.ts files, but if we were using a package which didn't ship declaration files, we'd need to install the appropriate @types/ package. Read more about using definition files in our documentation.

Add a TypeScript configuration file

You'll want to bring your TypeScript files together - both the code you'll be writing as well as any necessary declaration files.

To do this, you'll need to create a tsconfig.json which contains a list of your input files as well as all your compilation settings. Simply create a new file in your project root named tsconfig.json and fill it with the following contents:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "outDir": "./built/",
        "sourceMap": true,
        "strict": true,
        "noImplicitReturns": true,
        "module": "es2015",
        "moduleResolution": "node",
        "target": "es5"
    },
    "include": [
        "./src/**/*"
    ]
}

Notice the strict flag is set to true. At the very least, TypeScript's noImplicitThis flag will need to be turned on to leverage Vue's declaration files, but strict gives us that and more (like noImplicitAny and strictNullChecks). We strongly recommend using TypeScript's stricter options for a better experience.

Adding Webpack

We'll need to add a webpack.config.json to bundle our app.

var path = require('path')
var webpack = require('webpack')

module.exports = {
  entry: './src/index.ts',
  output: {
    path: path.resolve(__dirname, './dist'),
    publicPath: '/dist/',
    filename: 'build.js'
  },
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.vue$/,
        loader: 'vue-loader',
        options: {
          loaders: {
            // Since sass-loader (weirdly) has SCSS as its default parse mode, we map
            // the "scss" and "sass" values for the lang attribute to the right configs here.
            // other preprocessors should work out of the box, no loader config like this necessary.
            'scss': 'vue-style-loader!css-loader!sass-loader',
            'sass': 'vue-style-loader!css-loader!sass-loader?indentedSyntax',
          }
          // other vue-loader options go here
        }
      },
      {
        test: /\.tsx?$/,
        loader: 'ts-loader',
        exclude: /node_modules/,
        options: {
          appendTsSuffixTo: [/\.vue$/],
        }
      },
      {
        test: /\.(png|jpg|gif|svg)$/,
        loader: 'file-loader',
        options: {
          name: '[name].[ext]?[hash]'
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  resolve: {
    extensions: ['.ts', '.js', '.vue', '.json'],
    alias: {
      'vue$': 'vue/dist/vue.esm.js'
    }
  },
  devServer: {
    historyApiFallback: true,
    noInfo: true
  },
  performance: {
    hints: false
  },
  devtool: '#eval-source-map'
}

if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
  module.exports.devtool = '#source-map'
  // http://vue-loader.vuejs.org/en/workflow/production.html
  module.exports.plugins = (module.exports.plugins || []).concat([
    new webpack.DefinePlugin({
      'process.env': {
        NODE_ENV: '"production"'
      }
    }),
    new webpack.optimize.UglifyJsPlugin({
      sourceMap: true,
      compress: {
        warnings: false
      }
    }),
    new webpack.LoaderOptionsPlugin({
      minimize: true
    })
  ])
}

Add a build script

Open up your package.json and add a script named build to run Webpack. Your "scripts" field should look something like this:

"scripts": {
    "build": "webpack",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },

Once we add an entry point, we'll be able to build by running

npm run build

and have builds get triggered on changes by running

npm run build -- --watch

Create a basic project

Let's create the most bare-bones Vue & TypeScript example that we can try out. First, create the file ./src/index.ts:

// src/index.ts

import Vue from "vue";

let v = new Vue({
    el: "#app",
    template: `
    <div>
        <div>Hello {{name}}!</div>
        Name: <input v-model="name" type="text">
    </div>`,
    data: {
        name: "World"
    }
});

Let's check to see if everything is wired up correctly. Create an index.html with the following content at your root:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head></head>

<body>
    <div id="app"></div>
</body>
<script src="./dist/build.js"></script>

</html>

Now run npm run build and open up your index.html file in a browser.

You should see some text that says Hello World!. Below that, you'll see a textbox. If you change the content of the textbox, you'll notice how the text is synchronized between the two.

Congrats! You've gotten TypeScript and Vue fully hooked up!

Adding a component

As you've just seen, Vue has a very simple interface for when you need to accomplish simple tasks. When our page only needed to communicate a bit of data between two elements, it took very little code.

For more complex tasks, Vue is flexible in that it supports breaking your application into components. Components are useful for separating the concerns of how entities are displayed to the user. Read up more on components from Vue's documentation.

A Vue component can be declared in the following manner:

// src/components/Hello.ts

import Vue from "vue";

export default Vue.extend({
    template: `
        <div>
            <div>Hello {{name}}{{exclamationMarks}}</div>
            <button @click="decrement">-</button>
            <button @click="increment">+</button>
        </div>
    `,
    props: ['name', 'initialEnthusiasm'],
    data() {
        return {
            enthusiasm: this.initialEnthusiasm,
        }
    },
    methods: {
        increment() { this.enthusiasm++; },
        decrement() {
            if (this.enthusiasm > 1) {
                this.enthusiasm--;
            }
        },
    },
    computed: {
        exclamationMarks(): string {
            return Array(this.enthusiasm + 1).join('!');
        }
    }
});

This component has two buttons and some text. When rendered, it takes an initial name and an initialEnthusiasm which is the number of exclamation marks we want to display. When we hit the + button, it adds an exclamation mark to the end of the text. Likewise, when we hit the - button, it removes an exclamation mark unless we're down to just one.

Our root Vue instance can consume it as follows:

// src/index.ts

import Vue from "vue";
import HelloComponent from "./components/Hello";

let v = new Vue({
    el: "#app",
    template: `
    <div>
        Name: <input v-model="name" type="text">
        <hello-component :name="name" :initialEnthusiasm="5" />
    </div>
    `,
    data: { name: "World" },
    components: {
        HelloComponent
    }
});

However, we'll note that it is fairly popular to use Vue's single file components. Let's try writing the above as an SFC.

Single File Components

When using Webpack or Browserify, Vue has plugins like vue-loader and vueify which allow you to author your components in HTML-like files. These files, which end in a .vue extension, are single file components.

There are a few things that need to be put in place to use .vue files with TypeScript, but luckily we're already halfway there. We already installed vue-loader earlier when we got our dev dependencies. We also specified the appendTsSuffixTo: [/\.vue$/], option to ts-loader in our webpack.config.js file, which allows TypeScript to process the code extracted from a single file component.

One extra thing we'll have to do is tell TypeScript what .vue files will look like when they're imported. We'll do this with a vue-shims.d.ts file:

// src/vue-shims.d.ts

declare module "*.vue" {
    import Vue from "vue";
    export default Vue;
}

We don't need to import this file anywhere. It's automatically included by TypeScript, and it tells it that anything imported that ends in .vue has the same shape of the Vue constructor itself.

What's left? The editing experience! One of the best features TypeScript gives us is its editor support. To leverage that within .vue files, we recommend using Visual Studio Code with the Vetur plugin for Vue.

Now, let's write an SFC!

<!-- src/components/Hello.vue -->

<template>
    <div>
        <div class="greeting">Hello {{name}}{{exclamationMarks}}</div>
        <button @click="decrement">-</button>
        <button @click="increment">+</button>
    </div>
</template>

<script lang="ts">
import Vue from "vue";

export default Vue.extend({
    props: ['name', 'initialEnthusiasm'],
    data() {
        return {
            enthusiasm: this.initialEnthusiasm,
        }
    },
    methods: {
        increment() { this.enthusiasm++; },
        decrement() {
            if (this.enthusiasm > 1) {
                this.enthusiasm--;
            }
        },
    },
    computed: {
        exclamationMarks(): string {
            return Array(this.enthusiasm + 1).join('!');
        }
    }
});
</script>

<style>
.greeting {
    font-size: 20px;
}
</style>

and let's import it for our root instance:

// src/index.ts

import Vue from "vue";
import HelloComponent from "./components/Hello.vue";

let v = new Vue({
    el: "#app",
    template: `
    <div>
        Name: <input v-model="name" type="text">
        <hello-component :name="name" :initialEnthusiasm="5" />
    </div>
    `,
    data: { name: "World" },
    components: {
        HelloComponent
    }
});

Notice a few things about our single-file component:

• We had to write <script lang="ts"> to get it working with TypeScript.
• We had to import the component with the .vue extension in index.ts.
• We were able to write CSS isolated to our components in a <style> tag, which we couldn't do in our .ts components.
• We default-exported a call to Vue.extend (rather than the options bag itself). If you don't write Vue.extend, Vetur will make it look like things are working correctly, but you'll get an error when you build your project.

Try running npm run build and open up index.html to see the result!

What next?

You can try out this application by cloning it from GitHub.

Once you feel like you've got a handle on that, you can try out a sample TodoMVC-style app written in TypeScript and Vue. This TodoMVC-style sample features routing through vue-router so that your application can show different views depending on the current URL.

You may also want to look into Vuex if you're looking for Redux-style state management.