Auto import in Visual Studio Code only offering absolute path with Lerna subpackages in TypeScript

Question

For some reason, very recently my Visual Studio Code changed and started only offering absolute imports from the sub-package level with my Lerna packages, for example:

As you can see, the auto import is suggesting the @package/server/src/database path to the file when it should just be ../database as the file being edited is within the same package and is just one folder below the file containing the database variable I'm trying to use.

Is this a bug or configuration issue?

I've set my Import Module Specifiersetting for TypeScript in Visual Studio Code to all three options (auto, relative, and absolute) and none of them seem to make any difference.

Answer 1

In Visual Studio Code, menu File → Preferences → Settings → User Settings,

"typescript.preferences.importModuleSpecifier": "relative"

It works fine for me. It imports

import { RegistrationComponent } from '../../abc-modules/registration/registration.component';

in place of

import { RegistrationComponent } from 'app/abc-modules/registration/registration.component';

Answer 2

You might need a combination of baseUrl and paths.

tsconfig.json

  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": "./",
    "paths": {
      "holograph/src/*": ["src/*"]
    },
  }

VSCode settings

"typescript.preferences.importModuleSpecifier": "non-relative" // or "shortest"

My folders are like this. When I am in apps/app, I can auto-import in VSCode from packages with from 'holograph/src/ui/...'. But when I am in packages/holograph ui components, for a reason I haven't yet discovered, it auto-imports from src/ui, which gives a build error. I had to manually import from the package path hologrpah/src/ui. Doing the above paths import re-map fixed VSCode auto-imports.

node_modules
apps (next.js applications)
 ├── app
 |   └── pages
 ├── operator
 ├── storybook
packages (shared components & libraries)
 ├── holograph
 |   └── src
 |       └── ui
 ├── tsconfig
 ├── eslint-config-holograph
...

---

PS: This worked too, but I am not sure how valid this is. Basically setting the baseUrl one folder up. ‍♂️

  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": "../",
    },
  }

Answer 3

In Visual Studio Code, menu File → Preferences → Settings → User Settings

search by importModuleSpecifier

Answer 4

I landed here from Google and had the opposite problem. My Visual Studio Code instance always imported the relative path even though it was from a different Lerna package.

It turns out that I simply forgot to add the package that it was wrongly importing to my consuming package’s package.json file.

Now, everything works as expected.

Answer 5

My problem was that I had the baseUrl option set in my tsconfig.json file.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".", // remove
  },
}

After removing the option; VSCode immediately started importing via the relative path. The benefit of this method is that you can keep the VSCode option importModuleSpecifier set to shortest and relative path importing will still work.