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paths and baseUrl

You can use ts-node together with tsconfig-paths to load modules according to the paths section in tsconfig.json.

tsconfig.json
json
{
  "ts-node": {
    // Do not forget to `npm i -D tsconfig-paths`
    "require": ["tsconfig-paths/register"]
  }
}
tsconfig.json
json
{
  "ts-node": {
    // Do not forget to `npm i -D tsconfig-paths`
    "require": ["tsconfig-paths/register"]
  }
}

Why is this not built-in to ts-node?​

The official TypeScript Handbook explains the intended purpose for "paths" in "Additional module resolution flags".

The TypeScript compiler has a set of additional flags to inform the compiler of transformations that are expected to happen to the sources to generate the final output.

It is important to note that the compiler will not perform any of these transformations; it just uses these pieces of information to guide the process of resolving a module import to its definition file.

This means "paths" are intended to describe mappings that the build tool or runtime already performs, not to tell the build tool or runtime how to resolve modules. In other words, they intend us to write our imports in a way node already understands. For this reason, ts-node does not modify node's module resolution behavior to implement "paths" mappings.