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Generating TypeScript Interfaces

While building your own custom functionality into Payload, like plugins, hooks, access control functions, custom routes, GraphQL queries / mutations, or anything else, you may benefit from generating your own TypeScript types dynamically from your Payload config itself.

Run the following command in a Payload project to generate types:

payload generate:types

You can run this command whenever you need to regenerate your types, and then you can use these types in your Payload code directly.

For example, let's look at the following simple Payload config:

const config: Config = {
serverURL: process.env.PAYLOAD_PUBLIC_SERVER_URL,
admin: {
user: 'users',
}
collections: [
{
slug: 'users',
fields: [
{
name: 'name',
type: 'text',
required: true,
}
]
},
{
slug: 'posts',
admin: {
useAsTitle: 'title',
},
fields: [
{
name: 'title',
type: 'text',
},
{
name: 'author',
type: 'relationship',
relationTo: 'users',
},
]
}
]
}

By generating types, we'll end up with a file containing the following two TypeScript interfaces:

export interface User {
id: string;
name: string;
email?: string;
resetPasswordToken?: string;
resetPasswordExpiration?: string;
loginAttempts?: number;
lockUntil?: string;
}
export interface Post {
id: string;
title?: string;
author?: string | User;
}

In order for Payload to properly infer these types when using local operations, you'll need to alias the following in your tsconfig.json file:

{
"compilerOptions": {
// ...
"paths": {
"payload/generated-types": [
"./src/payload-types.ts", // Ensure this matches the path to your typescript outputFile
],
}
},
// ...
}

Customizing the output path of your generated types

You can specify where you want your types to be generated by adding a property to your Payload config:

{
// the remainder of your config
typescript: {
outputFile: path.resolve(__dirname, './payload-types.ts'),
},
}

The above example places your types next to your Payload config itself as the file generated-types.ts. By default, the file will be output to your current working directory as payload-types.ts.

Adding an NPM script

Payload will automatically try and locate your config, but might not always be able to find it. For example, if you are working in a /src directory or similar, you need to tell Payload where to find your config manually by using an environment variable. If this applies to you, you can create an NPM script to make generating your types easier.

To add an NPM script to generate your types and show Payload where to find your config, open your package.json and update the scripts property to the following:

{
"scripts": {
"generate:types": "PAYLOAD_CONFIG_PATH=src/payload.config.ts payload generate:types",
},
}

Now you can run yarn generate:types to easily generate your types.

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