TS1086: An accessor cannot be declared in an ambient context

Question

When running with Angular, I\'m getting thje error TS1086: An accessor cannot be declared in an ambient context. for Javascript getters and setters in this Abstract

Answer 1

I had this a similar problem with google-auth-library.

I'm on Ubuntu and call tsc to transpile my nodejs server from typescript to javascript, but running 'tsc' was throwing the 'TS1086: An accessor cannot be declared in an ambient context' error.

Initially, I tried updating typescript by running npm install typescript@latest from my server directory but was still seeing errors.

I had to update my global version of typescript so 'tsc' could run, but running npm install typescript@latest -g was also throwing errors. I had to remove the tsc link in /usr/bin/.

What I did to fix:

$ cd /usr/bin
$ sudo rm tsc
$ sudo npm install -g typescript@latest

Calling 'tsc' worked without errors after this.

Answer 2

This isn't an Angular error.

TypeScript 3.7 introduced a breaking change for getters and setters in the type definition files.

As mentioned above, TypeScript 3.7 emits get/set accessors in .d.ts files which can cause breaking changes for consumers on older versions of TypeScript like 3.5 and prior. TypeScript 3.6 users will not be impacted, since that version was future-proofed for this feature.

https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/release-notes/typescript-3-7.html#class-field-mitigations

You should be using TypeScript 3.6 or higher if you're going to consume type definitions generated with 3.7 or higher.