I have this in my app with the @types/express dependency installed
import express = require('express');
It is pointing to the express and saying this is an unexpected identifier when I run my server. I believe this is correct TS syntax and the regular JS way of const express = .. has the same error.
Do I need regular express? or wouldn't I need the one I already installed, which should be for TS specifically?
3 Answers
To replace require statement with import statement, for example:
const express = require('express');
You can convert it to this:
import * as express from "express";
And yes, you need both, regular express as dependency and @types/express as dev-dependency to have TypeScript type definitions working.
The syntax you want will be
import express from "express";
and it shouldn't result in a duplicate identifier error unless its simply a IDE bug. You can look into a common setup most people use to work with NodeJS/Typescript here.
I had a particularly difficult situation because I was using esmodules with our production/development, but commonjs with our testing tools.
I ended up getting it to work by using both imports.
app.ts
import express, * as express_test from "express"
const app = express ? express() : express_test()
