A Dev Container Template for TypeScript and Express.js

Learn how to create a template for a development container for TypeScript and Express.js. Plus a bonus for your npm-based projects!

Github repository configured to be a template

Introduction

In previous articles I have described how to set up a dev container for TypeScript (see “Creating a Dev Container for TypeScript and VS Code”, “TypeScript Dev Container Revisited: The February 2023 Edition”). The result is a template repository on github that makes it easy to create and start up a dev container with the basic dev tools preinstalled that you may need.

In this article I will take the concept one step further. This time, I will add everything needed to get a basic express.js application running. This will also serve as a building block to build an OpenID Connect (OIDC) example in a future article.

The usual pre-requisites for this article are:

1. VS Code
2. VS Code Extension “Remote Development”
3. Git CLI
4. Docker Desktop

As always, the entire source code for this article is available under the generous MIT license at https://github.com/RimuTec/dev-container-express.js-2023