Improvements for cdk init typescript

[rantoniuk]

General Issue

Improvements for cdk init typescript

The Question

After running cdk init app --language=typescript and checking how the project is set up, I can see the following that could be improved:

• @aws-cdk dependencies are pinned, while they could (should?) use ^1.141.0
• typescript major version is 3.x, could be bumped to ~4.4.4
• import 'source-map-support/register'; line doesn't seem to be needed

tsconfig.json

• add "outDir": "dist" and dist to exclude section to keep the workspace clean

Happy to provide PR if the above make sense, please let me know where to look though.

CDK CLI Version

1.141.0

Framework Version

No response

Node.js Version

14

OS

MacOS

Language

Typescript

Language Version

No response

Other information

No response

[peterwoodworth]

Hey @rantoniuk,

Our init templates can be found here

I don't think we'll want to pin dependencies or remove source map support, but I think we'd like to have the TS version upgraded 🙂

I'm unsure if we'll want to make the tsconfig change either

[rantoniuk]

Hi @peterwoodworth

• TS version is pinned and needs to be pinned because of incompatibility warning.
• I can see %cdk-version% but I can't find where it is defined/how it is computed. The resulting version should contain ~ or ^ instead of pinning specific cdk version.

I cannot react to the other two responses, since they do not contain any reason/explanation.
I will just wait then for a specific answer before creating any PRs in order not to waste time on both sides :)

[hoegertn]

For CDK v1 the version needs to be pinned as it will explode with version incompatibilities otherwise

[rantoniuk]

It will not explode if package-lock is used and all packages are upgraded when new packages are added.
We are using it this way and it works fine (indeed, we had the exploding problem indeed if not using npm upgrade after adding new packages).

[skinny85]

A package-lock.json will not help you when adding new versions though.

We've actually had ^ versions there before, and we decided to change them on purpose.

The TypeScript version is dictated by the JSII version we use.

[rantoniuk]

A package-lock.json will not help you when adding new versions though.

package-lock.json together with npm upgrade and ^ modifier works perfectly fine.
Indeed, if you don't want to promote the usage of the lockfile (which is a bad practice not only for CI), then sure, that will cause problems.

The TypeScript version is dictated by the JSII version we use.

Surely it should not be dictated up to a pinned version, but to a compatible version - i.e. it should use at least ~ to be able to get security fixes.

[TheRealAmazonKendra]

Thank you for your suggestions here. Given that we are unable to upgrade TypeScript at this time, need the source-map-support/register, and no longer use individual imports on v2, I think this issue should be closed at this time. If there are further improvements you'd like to propose on our v2 templates and/or believe this issue was closed in error, please feel free to open a new issue.

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