I'd actually love to see a good blog post that details the process of, say, upgrading from Babel 6 to Babel 7 for a non-CRA app, and then adding in some form of TS support on top of that. (I've got a couple apps that I'd like to try doing that with myself in the not too distant future.)

I don’t have a post but I took a half hour the other day and did it, it was basically:

Add typescript, babel typescript, add the plugin in babelrc, and update the Babel cli build command in package.json to look for ts file extensions.

That enabled me to start incrementally adding typescript into an existing node.js codebase, I was surprised how easy it was.

Here were the changes to get typescript working with an existing node.js codebase (babel 7)

package.json (scripts)

  BABEL_ENV=development babel -d build/ src/ --extensions \".ts,.tsx,.js\" --quiet --source-maps inline

package.json (add property)

  "type-check": "tsc",

package.json (dev depenencies)

  @babel/preset-typescript, typescript

babelrc (add with env)

  presets: ["@babel/typescript"]

tsconfig (example)

  {
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "esnext",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "declaration": true,
    "outDir": "build",
    "strict": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true
  }
}

Check out https://github.com/strothj/react-app-rewire-typescript-babel... for an example I helped get going. It was fairly straight forward!

Thanks, appreciate it!

They are independent, so you could read two blog posts, one for Babel 7 https://babeljs.io/docs/en/v7-migration and one for TS https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2018/08/27/types...

Then you'd still need to explicitly do type checking, which is the primary advantage of TypeScript. I guess my IDE can do that, but then I'd still need to add an extra step to my CI server, etc.

Native TypeScript support will be a huge improvement.