custom tsconfig location appears to be silently ignored when it's outside of the source folder ancestry

[moredip]

Acknowledgements

• I searched existing issues before opening this one to avoid duplicates
• I understand this is not a place for seek help, but to report a bug
• I understand that the bug must be proven first with a minimal reproduction
• I will be polite, respectful, and considerate of people's time and effort

Minimal reproduction URL

https://stackblitz.com/edit/node-49eqfc?file=README.md

Version

4.7.0

Node.js version

18.18.0

Package manager

pnpm

Operating system

Linux

Problem & Expected behavior

TL;DR

If I give tsx a tsconfig path that's a direct ancestor of the source directory then it is used as expected, but if I give it a tsconfig that's in a sibling directory then it appears to be silently ignored.

Details

I'm trying to use tsx to dynamically import jsx rendered using nano-jsx rather than React. Doing that requires configuring typescript's jsxImportSource compiler option, which in turn means providing a tsconfig.json file to tsx. For reasons that are a bit complex to get into, I sometimes need to keep that tsconfig.json outside of the folder heirarchy of the source I'm executing (my program is operating on externally provided files and I don't have permissions to add a tsconfig.json there).

What I've discovered is that tsx appears to silently ignores the compiler options of a tsconfig.json file if that file is outside of the source files' directory heirarchy.

Contributions

• I plan to open a pull request for this issue
• I plan to make a financial contribution to this project

[busybox11]

You'd probably need to use tsconfig's include directive for esbuild to process the source code. It looks like it's not present anywhere in your minimal reproduction repo.

[moredip]

You'd probably need to use tsconfig's include directive for esbuild to process the source code. It looks like it's not present anywhere in your minimal reproduction repo.

Thanks @busybox11, this worked! I don't really understand why though.

I updated elsewhere/_tsconfig.json as follows:

  "compilerOptions": {
    "jsx": "react-jsx",
    "jsxImportSource": "nano-jsx/lib"
  },
  "include": ["../subdir/**/*"]
}

and now things are working - nano-jsx is being used instead of React - but I don't understand why adding that include directive changed things