TS2688: Cannot find type definition file for 'howler'.

After I npm install use-sound, my gatsby build is complaining about this line:

node_modules/use-sound/dist/types.d.ts:1:23 - error TS2688: Cannot find type definition file for 'howler'.

1 /// <reference types="howler" />
                        ~~~~~~

node_modules/use-sound/dist/types.d.ts:20:12 - error TS2304: Cannot find name 'Howl'.

20     sound: Howl | null;
              ~~~~

I think perhaps you need to move @types/howler from devDependencies to just plain old dependencies?

[jwalton]

Ok, this is actually a slightly old-fashioned way of importing a module in TypeScript:

/// <reference types="howler" />

The more modern way would be to just do:

import { Howl } from 'howler';

Which should be pretty familiar synatax, even if you don’t know TS. The problem is that a little lower down, we’re doing:

export interface ExposedData {
    sound: Howl | null;
    stop: (id?: string) => void;
    pause: (id?: string) => void;
    isPlaying: boolean;
    duration: number | null;
}

So because sound is of type Howl, any typescript user using this library would need the howler type definitions, otherwise they won’t know what properties are available on “sound”. If you are exporting a type from a library (like you are here), it would be customary to put @types/howler in your dependencies (it’s true the non-TS people don’t need it, but at least it’s not a very large dependency, since it’s just type definitions).

Since TypeScript is duck typed, we could just copy the definition of Howl from @types/howler into this file, and then we don’t need the dependency anymore. There’s two reasons that’s not a great idea; first if Howl changes, we’d need to update it, which doesn’t sound fun. 😛 Second, the Howl interface is 71 lines long - about 50% of the Howl type definitions - and longer than your whole .d.ts file.

[jwalton]

Lemme look a little deeper into this. I’ll see if I can figure out a way to just remove that line. 😛

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 12:01 Joshua Comeau [e-mail] wrote:

Sweet! Maybe I’ll just update the README to include that, since I don’t think it makes sense as a dependency for folks who don’t use TS

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