Typescript debugging without an IDE

18 June 2025

Updated: 18 June 2025

I generally steer clear of IDEs. Their overall slowness and clunkyness makes using them a hassle. There is however one place they execel - debugging.

Recently I’ve been looking into how to get Node.js to debug some JS and TS code and this proved to be relatively simple

A JS file

Debugging a Javascript app is actually pretty straightforward, you can use node inspect followed by the file to debug. So this just looks like so:

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node inspect my-file.js

Runnning the above with a debugger; statement in your code will stop at the breakpoint and you can debug from there

You can then open your browser at chrome://inspect and select inspect on the process you’d like to debug

A TS File

Typescript requires you to have a few things installed. I’m going to assume that TypeScript is already installed in the project you’re working in. Additionally, you need to install ts-node into your project - this can be done using whatever package manager you’re currently using

You will also need to ensure that you have sourceMap enabled in your tsconfig.json file in order to have a bit of a decent debugging experience:

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{
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  "compilerOptions": {
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  // ... other stuff
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    "sourceMap": true
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  }
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}

Next, you can use node inspect with the ts-loader like so:

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node inspect -r ts-node/register my-file.ts

The process then is pretty much the same as for the Javascript file debugging above. You can use debugger; statements to add breakpoints, and you can open the debugger at chrome://inspect