TypeScript can be installed through three installation routes depending on how you intend to use it: an npm module, a NuGet package or a Visual Studio Extension.
If you are using Node.js, you want the npm version. If you are using MSBuild in your project, you want the NuGet package or Visual Studio extension.
Having TypeScript set up on a per-project basis lets you have many projects with many different versions of TypeScript, this keeps each project working consistently.
TypeScript is available as a package on the npm registry available as "typescript".
You will need a copy of Node.js as an environment to run the package. Then you use a dependency manager like npm, yarn or pnpm to download TypeScript into your project.
npm install typescript --save-devAll of these dependency managers support lockfiles, ensuring that everyone on your team is using the same version of the language. You can then run the TypeScript compiler using one of the following commands:
npx tscFor most project types, you can get TypeScript as a package in Nuget for your MSBuild projects, for example an ASP.NET Core app.
When using Nuget, you can install TypeScript through Visual Studio using:
Install-Package Microsoft.TypeScript.MSBuildFor project types which don't support Nuget, you can use the TypeScript Visual Studio extension. You can install the extension using Extensions > Manage Extensions in Visual Studio.
The examples below are for more advanced use cases.
It can be handy to have TypeScript available across all projects, often to test one-off ideas. Long-term, codebases should prefer a project-wide installation over a global install so that they can benefit from reproducible builds across different machines.
You can use npm to install TypeScript globally, this means that you can use the tsc command anywhere in your terminal.
To do this, run npm install -g typescript. This will install the latest version (currently 5.2).
You can install TypeScript as a Visual Studio extension, which will allow you to use TypeScript across many MSBuild projects in Visual Studio.
The latest version is available in the Visual Studio Marketplace.
There are other tools which convert TypeScript files to JavaScript files. You might use these tools for speed or consistency with your existing build tooling.
Each of these projects handle the file conversion, but do not handle the type-checking aspects of the TypeScript compiler. So it's likely that you will still need to keep the above TypeScript dependency around, and you will want to enable isolatedModules.
Babel is a very popular JavaScript transpiler which supports TypeScript files via the plugin @babel/plugin-transform-typescript.
swc is a fast transpiler created in Rust which supports many of Babel's features including TypeScript.
Sucrase is a Babel fork focused on speed for using in development mode. Sucrase supports TypeScript natively.