I was trying to get CodeQL running on the following repo:

https://github.com/jessehouwing/azure-pipelines-msbuild-helper-task/tree/a3aeaf4b459f1912ccf4706d0e0c93a16a4d5ed0

But Code QL analysis fails to find any Javascript / Typescript files. Neither in "default mode" nor in "advanced mode".

[2026-01-05 08:48:07] [build-stderr] Only found JavaScript or TypeScript files that were empty or contained syntax errors.

A workflow log can be found here:
https://github.com/jessehouwing/azure-pipelines-msbuild-helper-task/actions/runs/20710231226/job/59448894856

It is unclear from the error message and from the docs why i can't find any files, because there are 2 Typescript files in the repo, but they aren't in the root (which I suspect is causing the issue).

I managed to resolve this by adding a codeql-config.yml and specifying the paths property to include **/*.ts:

https://github.com/jessehouwing/azure-pipelines-msbuild-helper-task/blob/main/.github/codeql/codeql-config.yml

I don't see why I would have to do this. CodeQL should detect **/*.js, **/*.ts and a few other extensions by default if you'd ask me.

Either the docs should clearly specify how do solve this situation (the docs currently do not contain an entry for this specific error message). But it would be even better if the analysis step would pick a decent set of default search options when it can't find a project.json in the root of the repo.