auto import in vscode for lib exports not working for new project without explicit include in root tsconfig

Current Behavior

For a new empty project with a nestjs app and a workspace lib called “utils”, when typing the name of an exported function from @org/utils (for example exportedExampleA) in a file within the nestjs app I do not get an auto import suggestion from vscode’s IntelliSense.

Expected Behavior

If I’m typing exportedExampleA in a file within the nestjs app, I would expect vscode to suggest an auto import like import { exportedExampleA } from '@org/utils' so that I can select it without me having to type in the import manually.

Steps to Reproduce

nx g @nrwl/nest:application webapi
nx g @nrwl/workspace:library utils

// libs/utils/src/index.ts
export function exportedExampleA() {
  return 'lol';
}

// apps/webapi/src/main.ts
...
exportedExampleA // type this and expect auto import suggestion

Failure Logs

N/A.

Environment

OS: macOS 10.15.5 vscode: 1.47.1 nx: latest

Workaround

Add the following to the monorepo’s root tsconfig.json and restart vsc:

{
   ...
  "include": [
    "./libs/*/src/**/*",
    "./apps/*/src/**/*"
  ]
}

Auto import now works as expected.

[vsavkin]

Unfortunately, we cannot add “include” into the root tsconfig because it is inherited by all the projects. They have to be independent from each other.

Tollowing works:

Add the following to the lib:

export function funcA() {
  return 'lol';
}

export function funcB() {
  return 'lol';
}

Add the following the app:

import { funcA } from '@myscope/mylib' 

Now when type in “funcB”, vscode will autocomplete it. Basically as long as your app imports mylib anywhere in its source, the autocompletion from mylib will work. Otherwise it won’t. You can “fix” it manually by adding path to the lib to tsconfig.app.json of your app, but I personally would not do it. This is a limitation of how vscode autocompletion works. The language service has to know that myapp points to mylib before it can autocomplete tokens from it. The same is true about autocompleting tokens from node_modules.

As a side note, WebStorm doesn’t have this issue because their autocompletion doesn’t rely on the language service.

I don’t think this issue can be fixed on our side, so I’m going to close it.

[dgrbrady]

Just in case anyone else is stumbling through this, I have pretty much a blank NX workspace that I created yesterday with 1 barebones angular app and 1 barebones nestjs app. Both were generated via the NX CLI. Doing these 2 things fixed the issue for me:

1. Remove node_modules from the excludes property in tsconfig.base.json (only doing this did not fix the issue for me like others have suggested)
2. Add "../../node_modules/@angular/**/*.d.ts" to the include array in tsconfig.editor.json for your angular app. You may be able to add it in tsconfig.json or tsconfig.app.json, but based on file names alone, I figured it was more appropriate to place in the editor json since this is an editor related issue.