Cannot find name 'describe'. Do you need to install type definitions for a test runner?

I'm using VSCode as my IDE and in my Angular project, I had to comment-out/remove types in tsconfig.json and add jest in types at tsconfig.spec.json.

tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    // "types": []
  }
}

tsconfig.spec.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "types": ["jest", "node"]
  }
}

Simple checklist to solve this (for TypeScript and Jest).

1. Make sure you have @types/jest and @types/node installed.
2. Make sure you have linked these types in tsconfig.json so that: types: ["jest", "node"]
3. Make sure you don't have your tests or the tests directory excluded from tsconfig.json configuration in excluded property.

If you transpile to JS then you will need a separate tsconfig.json in your tests that includes your test files along with the necessary compiler options and files to build the appropriate context.

After fiddling with the tsconfig.json for a while I finally figured, that commenting the "types": [], will work.

failing config (before)

// tsconfig.json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "types": []
  }
}

working config

// tsconfig.json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    // "types": []
  }
}