Thanks to TypeScript 2.x Wildcard Module Declarations you can do the following: Somewhere in a *.d.ts file add this (or check if its already there): declare module "*.json" { const value : any; export default value ; } declare module "json!*" { const value : any; export default value ; } Then you can do things like this in your TypeScript code: import * as data1 from './data/some.json' ; import data2 from "json!http://foo.com/data_returns_json/" ; Note: I think this is already part of the ES6/ES2015 standard if you're writing plain JS targeting ES6/ES2015 .