Fix Cannot Find Namespace NodeJS

Table of Contents

Introduction

We will cover an easy Fix Cannot Find Namespace NodeJS.

I will break this review in the following sections:

The problem of why you are getting Cannot Find Namespace NodeJS
Show an example use-case of the problem
Demonstrate a solution with a bonus tip to resolve the problem

I have been using this fix successfully in many of my NodeJS projects with success.

I’m going to keep all the steps simple and straight to the point to avoid you have to spend endless hours debugging or trying to figure out why things aren’t working.

The Problem

The problem is that every NodeJS project that uses tsconfig requires a configuration file. This needs to have a file importing or using some types field in it which is Types. If this section is left empty or undefined then the namespace will not be available and it will cause your code to error out.

Typically this could be run via webpack or any other building tool you may be using to run your application.

If you are to include any files when building for example as part of Angular you will get the following error:

Cannot Find Namespace NodeJS

Example Of Problem

Let’s see a quick example of the problem and why this may not work for you. To do this we will be investigating a simple tsconfig file that got generated and has a Types section defined into it.

{
  "extends": "../tsconfig.json",
  "compilerOptions": {
    "outDir": "../build/app",
    "module": "esnext",
    "baseUrl": "",
    "types": []
  }
}

When building or running the above will trigger the issue we talked about earlier. But what is the root cause of this really.

Root Cause Of Problem

As described earlier the root cause is that either the types list is empty. It does not define any namespaces for the correct importing and building for webpack or whatever other tool you use. In order to fix this we need provide a simple solution that basically resolves the empty package field as discussed below.

Solution

Now lets move on to the solution which in this case is pretty simple.

To do this we basically populate the Types part of our configuration with this case the node namespace so it successfully resolves during the build. The correct format will look something like this:

{
  "extends": "../tsconfig.json",
  "compilerOptions": {
    "outDir": "../build/app",
    "module": "esnext",
    "baseUrl": "",
    "types": ["node"]
  }
}

As you can see above now we have successfully informed our build script about to include the node namespace when it executes.

To Test our theory we will perform the steps mentioned above to verify that everything is good.

Test To See If it works

The process to do this is fairly simple. All you need to do is re-run your build script dependency if it’s part of webpack and see if the error still appears. If it does then you may have some other issue in your code with Pathing and may require a namespace path adjustment. Since this is a very uncommon case and will only happen in very few cases. The majority should have the problem resolved by now. If you do run into further issues please drop me a line below and I will help you out.

In the case the above doesn’t work you may also want to add the type roots in your configuration as shown below:

"typeRoots": [
    "node_modules/@types"
]

Again this may not be necessary for most people but if the first solution is not sufficient this will ensure that the error is resolved.

Conclusion

We were able to successfully show how to demonstrate the Fix Cannot Find Namespace NodeJS.

If you found this useful and you think it may have helped you please drop me a cheer below I would appreciate it.

If you have any questions, comments please post them below or send me a note on my twitter. I check periodically and try to answer them in the priority they come in. Also if you have any corrections please do let me know and I’ll update the article with new updates or mistakes I did.

Do you use custom TSconfig code in your project?

I like to slightly adjust mine like ensuring I use the latest versions and have strict linting turned on to prevent future bugs.

If you would like to learn more about Node and Typescript please check the related articles below:

You can find some references below: