Troubleshooting Handbook: tsconfig.json

You can find all the Compiler options in the TypeScript docs. The new TS docs also has per-flag annotations of what each does. This is the setup I roll with for APPS (not libraries - for libraries you may wish to see the settings we use in tsdx):

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "incremental": true,
    "outDir": "build/lib",
    "target": "es5",
    "module": "esnext",
    "lib": ["dom", "esnext"],
    "sourceMap": true,
    "importHelpers": true,
    "declaration": true,
    "rootDir": "src",
    "strict": true,
    "noUnusedLocals": true,
    "noUnusedParameters": true,
    "noImplicitReturns": true,
    "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": true,
    "allowJs": false,
    "jsx": "react",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "baseUrl": "src",
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "suppressImplicitAnyIndexErrors": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "experimentalDecorators": true
  },
  "include": ["src/**/*"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules", "build", "scripts"]
}

You can find more recommended TS config here.

Please open an issue and discuss if there are better recommended choices for React.

Selected flags and why we like them:

esModuleInterop: disables namespace imports (import * as foo from "foo") and enables CJS/AMD/UMD style imports (import fs from "fs")
strict: strictPropertyInitialization forces you to initialize class properties or explicitly declare that they can be undefined. You can opt out of this with a definite assignment assertion.
"typeRoots": ["./typings", "./node_modules/@types"]: By default, TypeScript looks in node_modules/@types and parent folders for third party type declarations. You may wish to override this default resolution so you can put all your global type declarations in a special typings folder.

Compilation speed grows linearly with size of codebase. For large projects, you will want to use Project References. See our ADVANCED cheatsheet for commentary.