Node TS Starter

Description

A boilerplate template for a RESTFUL api backend using MongoDB and Node.JS using TypeScript

TypeScript compiles to JavaScript, but development can be run using the package ts-node without going through compilation.

However, deployment requires compilation to JavaScript for performance's sake, so tsc is used to compile the code to JavaScript to be run on the Node Runtime.

How to run

run npm i and then run npm run build to compile the TypeScript to JavaScript

Run npm run prod to launch the compiled Node code.

Libraries used

Winston: Logger
Mongoose: MongoDB Connector
TS-Node: Node Runtime for TypeScript
Signale: Simplified console logger
Chalk: Coloured console logging
Node Cache: Caching for incoming request

Remarks on TypeScript's Type Coverage

While popular NPM packages do have type coverage for typescript by installing the package @types/<package name>, It is far from perfect and requires some elbow grease (self definitions) for it to work right.

More information on how to handle this can be found in section # Handling TypeScript Type Completion Gaps

Handling TypeScript Type Completion Gaps

Sometimes Type completion might be lacking for TypeScript types (the library maintainers should have a more robust @types support). Other times, its that the libraries that TypeScript uses to compile to JS does not have updated typings for a particular type (e.g. Promises), and can be solved by going into tsconfig and include es2017 in the lib options.

To solve this, you need to declare the namespace for that type globally, and import it (if not declared in the same file)