Webpack 2 won't compile a single typescript file - node.js

Question

I'm on a project where I have multiple SPA on Angular JS, all written in typescript. I have the following directory structure:
src/
├── app
│ ├── frontend
│ │ ├── ...
│ │ └── frontend.module.ts
│ ├── backend
│ │ ├── ...
│ │ └── backend.module.ts
├── app.frontend.module.ts
├── app.backend.module.ts
Files at the root of src/ are the entry point for each app, they contain the following code (here for the frontend):
import * as angular from "angular";
import { FrontendModuleName } from './app/frontend/frontend.module';
angular.module('app', [FrontendModuleName]);
angular.bootstrap(document, ['app'], {
strictDi: true
});
So I should be able to tell Webpack to compile "src/app.frontend.module.ts", the compiler then follows the imports and everything gets merged nicely.
It works fine, but even if I explicitly tell Webpack to compile a single file, all of them are always compiled.
To give you an example, let's take this very basic configuration:
const path = require('path');
module.exports = {
context: path.resolve(__dirname, 'src'),
entry: {
frontend: './app.frontend.module.ts',
},
output: {
path: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist'),
filename: '[name].bundle.js',
},
module: {
loaders: [
{
test: /\.ts(x?)$/,
loaders: ['ts-loader']
}
]
}
};
Executing this will compile app.frontend.module.ts as requested BUT also app.backend.module.ts !
After some time I found out that it's not Webpack but the Typescript compiler who seems at fault, so I changed my .tsconfig to try to exclude the root files, like so :
{
"compilerOptions": {
...
},
"exclude": [
"node_modules",
"dist",
"dev",
"reports",
"./src/app.*.module.ts"
]
}
In a sense it works because it now ignores app.backend.module.ts, but it still tries to compile every .ts file in the src/app/backend/ directory!
That's where I am right now.. I've searched in the compiler options reference but didn't found any option to prevent the compiler to recursively compile everything.
In fact..
..I've found a very very ugly workaround that I don't find satisfying at all. There is the files options that can be used to specify what files should be compiled, but I cannot give it an empty array or an exception is thrown.
So I created an empty dummy.ts file in the src/ folder and it seems to work as expected:
{
"compilerOptions": {
...
},
"files": ["src/dummy.ts"],
"exclude": [
"node_modules",
"dist",
"dev",
"reports",
"./src/app.*.module.ts"
]
}
But I can't imagine there is no better way to handle this.
Any idea would be much appreciated.
Thanks for your help.