/production-ready-serverless-nestjs

Backend starter template for a NestJS GraphQL API on AWS Lambda with security and performance best practices

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Production Ready Serverless NestJS

This project contains a backend starter template for running NestJS GraphQL APIs on AWS Lambda with security and performance best practices.

NestJS GraphQL TypeScript AWS Prisma Postgres

Features

  • GraphQL configuration (Code-first approach)
  • Prisma Database config with migrations
  • Docker database for local development
  • AWS Deployment with Serverless Framework
  • AWS Lambda NodeJS 18x configuration and optimizations
  • GitHub actions for CI/CD

Not included

  • Authentication/Authorization

Technology Choices

NestJS

  • Opinionated, mature backend framework with active community
  • Supports dependency injection out of the box
  • First-class typescript support

GraphQL

  • Provides a query language that lets clients specify the data they need
  • Strong support in frontend frameworks like React

AWS Lambda

  • Pay-per-use pricing is ideal for early-stage startups where traffic and access patterns are unknown
  • Cold starts can be minimized by keeping package bundles small, caching server between invocations and keeping lambdas warm

Serverless framework

  • Strong community of plugins and supports for NodeJS/Typescript

Prisma

  • ORM with great developer experience
  • Excellent Typescript support

Supabase

  • Hosted serverless Postgres database

Dependencies

  • NodeJS
  • NVM brew install nvm
  • Yarn
  • Docker
  • VSCode
  • AWS Account

Setup

Local Development

  1. Create a .env file using .env.example as an example

  2. nvm use

  3. yarn install

  4. Launch Supabase in Docker with npx supabase start

  5. Run database migrations locally in a separate terminal if it's a first time setup with npx prisma migrate dev

  6. Seed the database with npx prisma db seed

  7. Start the NestJS server with yarn start:dev

  8. Call the endpoints in requests.http to test the API.

Integration tests

yarn test:e2e

Webpack bundling

yarn build # with webpack

# run binary locally
node dist/main.js

Serverless Offline

Test AWS Lambda packaging and run locally with:

npx serverless offline

AWS Deployment

Note - create all AWS and Supabase resources in the us-east-1 AWS region.

  1. Setup your AWS Credentials for deployments

  2. Create a free-tier Supabase database.

  3. Create an AWS SSM Parameter in the AWS console named /dev/database/url with the secure string type and save the DB connection string.

    Confirm it exists with:

    aws ssm get-parameter --name /dev/database/url --with-decryption

  4. Install dependencies:

    nvm use 18
yarn install

  5. Deploy the app to AWS:

    npx serverless deploy

Update requests.http with the output of the deployment to call the API.

Database Migrations

# create migrations
npx prisma migrate dev --name <MIGRATION_NAME>

# run migration
npx prisma migrate dev

# reset development database
npx prisma migrate reset

Note - an ERD diagram for the database schema will be generated under /docs - see diagram.

Production Database Migrations

Production database migrations should be run in a CI/CD pipeline but can also be run locally with:

npx prisma migrate deploy

See the Prisma docs for more information.

Resources

Suggested SaaS integrations

Auth

Monitoring