node: creating a debugger setup for visual studio code and mochajs for typescript tests

The title of the post says everything that I wanted to say. I have been looking at how to create a more streamlined environment for my nodejs typescript development.
I was specifically interested in how to start only a specific test with the interactive debugger. I did not want to change the launch config every time I worked on a new test and I also wanted to handle mocha test  written in typescript.

I normally have a tsc process started in separate command window running tsc -w command.This watches all files and compiles when needed.

Here are the changes I made to Visual Studio Code and my environment.
In my project I installed:

• typescript
• mocha
• mocha-typescript

I decided to hide all TypeScript generated files via adding a files.exclude directive to my USER SETTING  (access via File:Preferences:Settings), like so:

"files.exclude": { "**/.git": true, "**/.svn": true, "**/.hg": true, "**/CVS": true, "**/.DS_Store": true, "**/*.js.map": true, "**/*.js": { "when": "$(basename).ts"} }

Then came the harder part. Finding a launch.config elements that would work (access via Debug:Open Configurations). I wanted to be able to open the debug pane and open the typescript test file I was working on, set breakpoints and click on "Start Debugging" button (green play button) and have the process kick off correctly.

This was not as trivial as I initially envisioned and much googling and blog reading ensued.
Here is the launch.config segment that worked for me.

{ "type": "node", "request": "launch", "name": "Debug TS mocha", "program": "${workspaceRoot}/node_modules/mocha/bin/_mocha", "stopOnEntry": false, "args": ["${fileBasenameNoExtension}.js","--no-timeouts", "--trace-warnings","--colors"], "cwd": "${fileDirname}", "sourceMaps": true, "outFiles": [], "env": { "NODE_ENV": "testing"} }

This works well with standard mocha js test as well as typescript test files. For typescript you need to either have a watcher going or add a preprocess to the launch.config that transpiles your typescript first.

Hope this will save someone the head scratching I went though.

Cheers,
B.