Setting up TypeScript

In this tutorial, we will use TypeScript to implement our bot.

caution

The tutorial assumes that you already have Node.js and npm installed on your machine.

If you want to use a different programming language, check out the Quickstart guide for a list of officially supported programming languages. If you're missing your language of choice, you can probably generate API bindings from the game's Protocol Buffers yourself. However, this is not covered by this tutorial.

Setting up a new project

First, let's start by setting up a new project.

Create a new directory for the project at a location of your choosing. Then open a terminal, cd into the new directory, and run the following command to get started:

npm init -y

Open the newly created package.json file and review its contents. Feel free to give your bot a funky name, and change anything else that doesn't suit your needs.

tip

We recommend that you use a version control system like Git for your bot so that you can try out different ideas easily.

Adding TypeScript

We'll follow the instructions of TypeScript to add it to the project, and add it as a dependency to our project:

npm install --save-dev typescript

We also want to add ts-node as a dependency. With ts-node, we can run the bot without having to first compile the code to JavaScript. You'll see what that means in a second. First, add it as a dependency:

npm install --save-dev ts-node

Creating the script

For now, we'll create a simple script that we can run and that'll print Hello, World! to the command-line. It's enough to prove that TypeScript is working, without overwhelming us at this point with other challenges.

Inside the project folder, create a new directory called src. In there, create a file called main.ts. At this point, your directory structure should look like this:

.
├── node_modules
│   └── ...
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
└── src
    └── main.ts

Open src/main.ts, and add the following content:

function main() {
  console.log("Hello, World!");
}

main();

That's it for now. Let's run the script.

Running the script

Thanks to ts-node, we can run the script without having to compile it to JavaScript first.

$ npx ts-node src/main.ts
Hello, World!

We can make it a bit easier to run the script, though. Let's open up package.json, and make this command our start script. Find the "scripts" section in the file, and add the following "start" command:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "npx ts-node src/main.ts"
  }
}

We can now run our bot by simply running npm start. That's a lot easier to remember.

$ npm start

> node-traffic-controller@0.0.0 start
> npx ts-node src/main.ts

Hello, World!

This concludes setting up TypeScript in the project. We have a script that we can run, and the next step is adding the game's Node SDK and making an API request.