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Solving a compilation problem that may occur in Eclipse with TypeScript/Angular projects

The full error message is quite useless and is as follow:

Cannot compile modules unless the ‘–module’ flag is provided with a valid module type. Consider setting the ‘module’ compiler option in a ‘tsconfig.json’ file

The only thing I found about it is this bug discussion on GitHub, which doesn’t help much either, but gives a clue: basically, check that your tsconfig.json file is there (if not, run tsc -init) and looks good.

In a recent post, I showed how to hide files in a project. I use this to hide .js and .js.map files, and the node_modules folder. It seems that, in Eclipse 4.6 “Neon”, when you hide the node_modules right from the start (before the first TypeScript compilation in your project), it may cause that error message to pop up (actually it even caused an error message about @angular/core being not found), and then it will stick around.
Sadly, the only way I found to make it disappear is to delete the project and re-create it (NB: no need to delete the whole project, just remove the project from Eclipse, then delete the .project file, and then re-create a project in Eclipse). Then run a TypeScript compilation, and after that you should be able to hide the node_modules folder without the error message reappearing.

Posted in Eclipse, programming, web development.


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