ts-jest does not recognize es6 imports

I eventually found out what the problem was. It turns out it was there in ts-jest's README all the time.

There's a section in the README titled Using ES2015+ features in Javascript files. In these cases, you need to instruct jest to use babel-jest as a transform for .js files.

"jest": {  "transform": {    "^.+\\.jsx?$": "babel-jest", // Adding this line solved the issue    "^.+\\.tsx?$": "ts-jest"  },  // ...},

As the documentation you found says, ts-jest requires CommonJS modules, so since your main tsconfig.json sets "module": "es6", you'll need to create a separate tsconfig.json file for ts-jest that extends your main tsconfig.json and sets "module": "commonjs".

If you are using create-react-app , try this :

Even though create-react-app comes pre-configured, we still had to add in custom configuration since our app wasn't initially built with cra. I installed some new dev dependencies:

"babel-cli": "^6.26.0","babel-jest": "^22.4.1","babel-preset-react-app": "^3.1.1",

And also updated the .babelrc (create this file if it doesn't exist ) :

{"presets": [    "@babel/preset-env",    "@babel/preset-react"      ]}

And now both jest and npm test both work as they should.