gcampax/decoders

Elegant validation library for type-safe input data (for TypeScript and Flow)

Elegant and battle-tested validation library for type-safe input data for TypeScript and Flow.

Motivation

Data entering your application from the outside world should not be trusted without validation and often is of the any type, effectively disabling your type checker around input values. It's an industry good practice to validate your expectations right at your program's boundaries. This has two benefits: (1) your inputs are getting validated, and (2) you can now statically know for sure the shape of the incoming data. Decoders help solve both of these problems at once.

Example

import { array, iso8601, number, object, optional, string } from 'decoders';

//
// Incoming data at runtime
//
const externalData = {
    id: 123,
    name: 'Alison Roberts',
    createdAt: '1994-01-11T12:26:37.024Z',
    tags: ['foo', 'bar'],
};

//
// Write the decoder (= what you expect the data to look like)
//
const userDecoder = object({
    id: number,
    name: string,
    createdAt: optional(iso8601),
    tags: array(string),
});

//
// Call .verify() on the incoming data
//
const user = userDecoder.verify(externalData);
//    ^^^^
//    TypeScript can automatically infer this type now:
//
//    {
//      id: number;
//      name: string;
//      createdAt?: Date;
//      tags: string[];
//    }
//

Documentation

Documentation can be found on https://decoders.cc.

Building your own decoders

There is a dedicated page in the docs that explains how to build your own decoders — it’s fun!