usage.md

title	Usage

Command Line

# Execute a script as `node` + `tsc`.
ts-node script.ts

# Starts a TypeScript REPL.
ts-node

# Execute code with TypeScript.
ts-node -e 'console.log("Hello, world!")'

# Execute, and print, code with TypeScript.
ts-node -p -e '"Hello, world!"'

# Pipe scripts to execute with TypeScript.
echo 'console.log("Hello, world!")' | ts-node

# Equivalent to ts-node --transpileOnly
ts-node-transpile-only script.ts

# Equivalent to ts-node --cwdMode
ts-node-cwd script.ts

# Equivalent to ts-node --esm
ts-node-esm script.ts

Shebang

To write scripts with maximum portability, specify options in your tsconfig.json and omit them from the shebang.

#!/usr/bin/env ts-node

// ts-node options are read from tsconfig.json

console.log("Hello, world!")

Including options within the shebang requires the env -S flag, which is available on recent versions of env. (compatibility)

#!/usr/bin/env -S ts-node --files
// This shebang works on Mac and Linux with newer versions of env
// Technically, Mac allows omitting `-S`, but Linux requires it

To test your version of env for compatibility with -S:

# Note that these unusual quotes are necessary
/usr/bin/env --debug '-S echo foo bar'

node flags and other tools

You can register ts-node without using our CLI: node -r ts-node/register and node --loader ts-node/esm

In many cases, setting NODE_OPTIONS will enable ts-node within other node tools, child processes, and worker threads. This can be combined with other node flags.

NODE_OPTIONS="-r ts-node/register --no-warnings" node ./index.ts

Or, if you require native ESM support:

NODE_OPTIONS="--loader ts-node/esm"

This tells any node processes which receive this environment variable to install ts-node's hooks before executing other code.

If you are invoking node directly, you can avoid the environment variable and pass those flags to node.

node --loader ts-node/esm --inspect ./index.ts

Programmatic

You can require ts-node and register the loader for future requires by using require('ts-node').register({ /* options */ }).

Note that this does not support ESM, node currently does not offer a way to programmatically add hooks when using ES modules. If you want to programmatically use ts-node with ESM support you need to write your own module loader which wraps ts-node and then invoke it in one of the ways described above.

Check out our API for more features.