Get rid of ugly highly nested paths by typescript path alias

Get rid of ugly highly nested paths by typescript path alias

If you are using TypeScript in your project and you have not set up path aliases, you may encounter some issues when trying to import modules or files from different locations in your codebase.

Without path aliases, you will need to use relative paths to import files, which can quickly become unwieldy and difficult to maintain as your project grows in size. For example, if you have a file located in src/components/Button.ts and you want to import it into a file located in src/containers/App.ts, you would need to use a relative path like this:

import Button from '../components/Button';

When your project goes medium or robust size, this may cause you a big headache. Here is the worst example of highly nested ugliest module importing.

This can be especially problematic if you need to import a file from a deeply nested location, as the relative path can become very long and hard to read.

To avoid these issues, it is recommended to set up path aliases in your TypeScript project. This allows you to define short, easy-to-remember aliases for commonly used paths in your codebase, which can then be used to import files and modules more easily.

Path aliases allow you to use shorter, more descriptive names to refer to files or directories in your project, rather than having to use the full file path. This can make your code easier to read and maintain, as well as make it easier to refactor your project if you need to move files around.

To use path aliases in TypeScript, you first need to set up your project to use them. This can be done in the tsconfig.json file, which is used to configure the TypeScript compiler. In the compilerOptions section of the file, you can set the baseUrlproperty to the root directory of your project, and the pathsproperty to a map of alias names to file paths.

For example, you could set up a path alias for the src a directory like this:

"compilerOptions": {
  "baseUrl": ".",
  "paths": {
    "*": ["src/*"]
  }
}

With this configuration, you could then import the Button a component like this:

import Button from 'components/Button';

This is much easier to read and maintain, and makes it much easier to work with large codebases.

Another example

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      "@src/*": ["src/*"],
      "@models/*": ["src/models/*"]
    }
  }
}

This configuration sets up two path aliases: @src and @models. The @srcan alias can be used to refer to any file in the srcdirectory, and the @modelsan alias can be used to refer to any file in the src/modelsdirectory.

To use a path alias in your TypeScript code, you can simply use the alias name in place of the full file path. For example, instead of importing a file from the src a directory like this:

import { SomeClass } from '../src/some-file';

You can use the @src alias like this:

import { SomeClass } from '@src/some-file';

Path aliases can be especially useful when working with large projects with deep directory hierarchies, as they can help you avoid having to use long, cumbersome file paths. They can also make it easier to refactor your project, as you can simply update the alias map in your tsconfig.json file if you need to move files around, rather than having to update the file paths in every file that imports them.

Overall, path aliases are a powerful and useful feature of TypeScript that can help you write cleaner, more maintainable code in your projects.