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Usage with transpilers

Babel​

When compiling TS via babel, decorators are by default handled different implementation than what tsc uses. To make the metadata extraction from decorators via Babel work, we need to do use following plugins:

{
  "plugins": [
    "babel-plugin-transform-typescript-metadata",
    ["@babel/plugin-proposal-decorators", { "legacy": true }],
    ["@babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties", { "loose": true  }]
  ]
}

Make sure to install the plugins first: yarn add -D babel-plugin-transform-typescript-metadata @babel/plugin-proposal-decorators @babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties

Lastly we need to set the BABEL_DECORATORS_COMPAT environment variable to true to adjust the return value of decorators.

More information about this topic can be found here:

SWC​

When compiling TS via SWC, decorator metadata is not emitted by default, regardless of what you may have specified in tsconfig.json. In addition, class names are mangled by default when the target is "es5" which is SWC's default. This causes problems when the name of a table is inferred from the class name, as opposed to being explicitly specified as a decorator option. Telling SWC to preserve the class names in turn requires a target of "es2016" or higher. For the best overall performance, and because MikroORM is ultimately running on a server, you may want to set the target to "esnext". That way, SWC does the fewest transformations possible and produces the most modern code possible.

So, to make the metadata extraction from decorators and class name preservation via SWC work correctly, we need the following config in our .swcrc file:

{
  "jsc": {
    "parser": {
      "syntax": "typescript",
      "decorators": true
    },
    "transform": {
      "decoratorMetadata": true,
      "legacyDecorator": true
    },
    "target": "esnext",
    "minify": false
  }
}

If you'd like to enable minification, you may also need to set jsc.keepClassNames to true, as well as the equivalent "mangle" and "compress" options to preserve class names.

More information about this topic can be found here: