About openapi-typescript

Used by

Bigcommerce: Node SDK for the BigCommerce API
Budibase: low code platform for creating internal tools, workflows, and admin panels
Fedora fmn: tools and APIs for Fedora’s messaging infra
Fingerprint: device fingerprinting for high-scale applications
Google Firebase CLI: Official CLI for Google’s Firebase platform
GitHub Octokit: Official SDK for the GitHub API
Lotus: open source pricing & packaging infra
Jitsu: modern, open source data ingestion / data pipelines
Medusa: building blocks for digital commerce
Netlify: the modern development platform
Nuxt: The Intuitive Vue framework
Relevance AI: build and deploy AI chains
Revolt: open source user-first chat platform
Spacebar: a free, open source, self-hostable Discord-compatible chat/voice/video platform
Supabase: The open source Firebase alternative.
Twitter API: Official SDK for the Twitter API

Project goals

Support converting any valid OpenAPI schema to TypeScript types, no matter how complicated.
Generated types should be statically-analyzable and runtime-free (with minor exceptions like enums.
Don’t validate schemas; there are existing libraries for that like Redocly.
Generated types should match your original schema as closely as possible, preserving original capitalization, etc.
Typegen only needs Node.js to run (no Java, Python, etc.) and works in any environment.
Support fetching OpenAPI schemas from files as well as local and remote servers.

Differences

vs. swagger-codegen

openapi-typescript was created specifically to be a lighterweight, easier-to-use alternative to swagger-codegen that doesn’t require the Java runtime or running an OpenAPI server. Nor does it generate heavyweight clientside code. In fact, all the code openapi-typescript generates is runtime free static types for maximum performance and minimum client weight.

vs. openapi-typescript-codegen

These 2 projects are unrelated. openapi-typescript-codegen is a Node.js alternative to the original swagger-codegen, but ends up being the same in practice. openapi-typescript has the same advantage of being runtime free whereas openapi-typescript-codegen can generate some pretty heavy bundles, up to 250 kB or more depending on the schema complexity.

vs. tRPC

tRPC is an opinionated type-safe framework for both server and client. It demands both your server and client be written in tRPC (which means Node.js for the backend).

If you fit into this usecase, it’s a great experience! But for everyone else, openapi-typescript (and openapi-fetch) is a more flexible, lower-level solution that can work for any technology choice (or even be incrementally-adopted without any cost).