import 'api' not import '../../../../../../api' with create-react-app and TypeScript

February 08, 2018

Absolute imports are better than relative ones, just ask your mailman. Aptly named article Say Goodbye to ‘../../../..’ in your TypeScript Imports explains how to enable absolute imports in your regular TypeScript based projects, but for create-react-app using create-react-app-typescript (check it out at GitHub repo) it cannot work since we cannot edit webpack.config.js.

But there is hope! Follow these steps (if you have working CRA app with TypeScript setup):

  1. Add react-app-rewired:

    npm install -save-dev react-app-rewired

  2. Add config-overrides.js to your root file with the following configuration:

const path = require("path")

/* config-overrides.js */

function srcPath(subdir) {
  return path.join(__dirname, subdir)

module.exports = function override(config, env) {
  //do stuff with the webpack config...
  config.resolve.alias.api = srcPath("src/api")
  return config
  1. Update your tsconfig.json file:
  "baseUrl": ".",
  "paths": {
    "api": [ "src/api/index" ]

Since I have an src/api/index.ts file I can now write import {} from "api" no matter which file I am editing. It is easy to add additional mappings but remember to update both the overrides and the TypeScript configuration file.