Avoiding relative paths in Angular CLI

Per this comment, you can add your application source via paths in tsconfig.json:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    ...,  
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      ...,
      "@app/*": ["app/*"],
      "@components/*": ["components/*"]
    }
  }
}

Then you can import absolutely from app/ or components/ instead of relative to the current file:

import {TextInputConfiguration} from "@components/configurations";

Note: baseUrl must be specified if paths is.

See also

  • https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/module-resolution.html#path-mapping

Thanks to jonrsharpe's answer for pointing me in right direction. Although, after adding the paths, as defined in answer, I was still not able to make it work. For anyone else facing same problem as me in future, here's what I did to fix the issues.

I have a shared module and its services are being used in multiple components, so...

tsconfig.json:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        ...
        "baseUrl": ".", //had to add this too
        "paths": {
            "@shared/*": ["src/app/modules/shared/*"]
        }
    }
}

After this, VS Code was able to resolve the import but I still got following error from webpack while compilation.

Module not found: Error: Can't resolve

To fix this I had to add

  1. baseUrl of tsconfig in webpack's resolve.modules
  2. paths of tsconfig in webpack's resolve.alias

webpack.config.js:

resolve: {
  extensions: ['*', '.js', '.ts'],
  modules: [
    rootDir,
    path.join(rootDir, 'node_modules')
  ],
  alias: {
    '@shared': 'src/app/modules/shared'
  }
},

component.ts:

import { FooService } from '@shared/services/foo.service'
import { BarService } from '@shared/services/bar.service'
import { BazService } from '@shared/services/baz.service'

To make it even more cleaner, I added an index.d.ts inside services folder and exported all my services from there, like this:

index.d.ts:

export * from './foo.service';
export * from './bar.service';
export * from './baz.service';

and now inside any component:

import { FooService, BarService, BazService } from '@shared/services';