ts-node cannot find module

I have two files:

• src/app/index.ts
• src/config.ts

Within index.ts:

import { getConfig } from "config";  
getConfig();

Within config.ts:

export const getConfig = () => console.log("hello world!");

I have a tsconfig.json file:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "outDir": "./ts-build/",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "baseUrl": "src",
    "target": "es5"
  }
}

Running ts-node ./src/app/index.ts throws me: Error: Cannot find module 'config'. Setting moduleResolution to classic doesn’t change anything.

Versions:

"ts-node": "^3.3.0",
"typescript": "^2.5.2"

Any ideas if this is a ts-node issue, typescript issue or did I do something wrong?

[tedcurrent]

Thanks for the reply @blakeembrey. I’ve run this with tsc --traceResolution and the resolution works fine as seen here:

======== Resolving module 'config' from 'C:/Dev/test-ts-node/src/app/index.ts'. ========
Explicitly specified module resolution kind: 'NodeJs'.
'baseUrl' option is set to 'C:/Dev/test-ts-node/src', using this value to resolve non-relative module name 'config'.
Resolving module name 'config' relative to base url 'C:/Dev/test-ts-node/src' - 'C:/Dev/test-ts-node/src/config'.
Loading module as file / folder, candidate module location 'C:/Dev/test-ts-node/src/config', target file type 'TypeScript'.
File 'C:/Dev/test-ts-node/src/config.ts' exist - use it as a name resolution result.
======== Module name 'config' was successfully resolved to 'C:/Dev/test-ts-node/src/config.ts'. ========

What I actually discovered was that I have to have the environment variable NODE_PATH set to match the baseUrl also. I ended up running the following: NODE_PATH=./src ts-node ./src/app/index.ts.

Now I know we can’t set environment variables in tsconfig, this would be convenient and isn’t a ts-node concern. However, do you have any thoughts if environment variables could be somehow settable on the ts-node side? I’m running nodemon in development and there it’s easy to set within nodemon.json.

[abinici]

I also ran into this issue in my NestJS project when I tried enabling debugging in VSCode. I managed to solve this by changing my nodemon.json to:

{
  "watch": ["src"],
  "ext": "ts",
  "ignore": ["src/**/*.spec.ts"],
  "exec": "node -r tsconfig-paths/register -r ts-node/register src/main.ts"
}

It was the part -r tsconfig-paths/register that fixed it. This parameter will convert paths into physical file paths.