[Enhancement] Nightwatch Typescript Support

[vaibhavsingh97]

Currently, Typescript support in Nightwatch isn't great. For example, for a user to run a typescript project, firstly user needs to compile and then the user needs to run tests using Nightwatch CLI. So we wanted to fix the experience.

This is a list of Project that needs improvement.

Create Nightwatch

• Use tsc –init for the new npm project, to create tsconfig config file
• Add BDD test example
• Creating Nightwatch.conf.ts for typescript projects (After Nightwatch release, which supports native typescript transpiling)
  • Refactoring of “Nightwatch.conf.ts” for typescript projects. Since it uses module.exports, which typescript understands but not the recommended way.

Nightwatch Typescript Boilerplate

• Add BDD test example

Nightwatch Docs

• Docs about writing and Organizing tests

  • What you will learn section
  • Folder structure for both Javascript and Typescript
  • Writing Tests
  • Running Tests
  • Test Status
  • Troubleshooting tests (Pause and Debug)

• Docs for installing Typescript (Related PR: Add: guide for typescript setup nightwatch-docs#130)

  • Should talk about
    • Manual (Quick one)
      • Installing typescript and ts-node
      • Configuring tsconfig.json (recommended config and location of the config)
        • Note on Existing Nightwatch project can use typescript
    • Alternative way (recommended for new projects)
      • Using create-nightwatch tool
      • Talk about create-nightwatch to scaffold config and example tests

Nightwatch

• Add support for nightwatch.conf.ts
  • New types for Nightwatch configuration in @types/nightwatch
• Show relevant error message on CLI
  • ts-node is not present
  • ts-node failed to load
• Load ts-node if project is using typescript
  • Read typescript config from nightwatch/tsconfig.json or tsconfig.nightwatch.json. Precedence will be given to nightwatch/tsconfig.json.
• If the user is using Nightwatch in typescript project the old way (aka compiling)
  • Show the doc link to users that they can run typescript files directly
• If the user already has ts-node installed and tsconfig file, then the user can run both typescript/javascript file

[vaibhavsingh97]

Closing this issue, as all issues are linked in #3300