rollup-plugin-dts

This is an EXPERIMENT to generate roll-upd .d.ts definition files from your .ts files.

It is complete enough to generate its own definition file, and it is used successfully for intl-codegen as well.

Usage

Install the package from npm:

$ npm install --save-dev tslib rollup rollup-plugin-dts

Create your rollup.config.js:

import resolve from "rollup-plugin-node-resolve";
// NOTE: The plugin has two different modes:
// * one to transpile `.ts -> .js`
// * one to create `.ts -> .d.ts` bundles
import { ts, dts } from "rollup-plugin-dts";

const config = [
  {
    input: "./src/index.ts",
    // NOTE: The first output is your transpiled typescript
    output: [{ file: "dist/my-library.js", format: "cjs" }, { file: "dist/my-library.mjs", format: "es" }],

    plugins: [
      resolve({
        jsnext: true,
        extensions: [".ts"],
      }),
      ts(),
    ],
  },
  {
    input: "./src/index.ts",
    // NOTE: The second output is your bundled `.d.ts` file
    output: [{ file: "dist/my-library.d.ts", format: "es" }],

    plugins: [dts()],
  },
];

export default config;

And then instruct node or other bundles where to find your code

  "main": "dist/my-library.js",
  "module": "dist/my-library.mjs",
  "types": "dist/my-library.d.ts",

Limitations / Known Bugs

Exporting namespaces currently does not work and will create invalid .d.ts files.

import * as ns from "./namespace";

export { ns };

Using import * as itself is not a problem and works fine on its own. It is the re-export that breaks.

---

Using inline imports either as namespace or with external modules.

interface Foo {
  namespace: import("./namespace");
  external: import("external").Foo;
}

Using specific items from a local inline import, such as import("./local").Item, works fine however.

Why?

Well, ideally TypeScript should just do all this itself, and it even has a proposal to do that. But there hasn’t been any progress in ~3 years.

Some projects, like rollup itself go the route of completely separating their public interfaces in a separate file.

Alternatives

• API Extractor
• dts-bundle-generator

See some discussions about all three of these projects and their tradeoffs.

Surprisingly, all three projects struggle with similar edge-cases around namespaces and inline imports, as documented above.

How does it work