Typescript, Express, Jest, ESLint and Prettier Template Project

This is a basic and bare bones/base project to be used as a template and build upon (or tear things out of if not needed). It is not meant to have an exhaustive/final list of modules/packages included - instead it is to act as a jumping off point.

Express - For serving content as a web server
Jest & supertest - For testing
ESLint - For some opinionated code rules
Prettier - For some opinionated code formatting

The package.json has some commands (scripts) pre-defined to get started with.

Alternative/Other packages of interest

Express, while tried, tested and battle hardened could be swapped out for 'new kid on the block' fastify.
TypeStack's class-validator looks to be an interesting package, making use of annotations on class properties to define 'valid' states/values for those properties. TypeStack have a lot of other cool tools, worth checking out.
Swagger could be added for 'automatic' API document generation.

Building and Running

`.env` files and values

We expect many of the values to be fed in to the application via Environment Variables, here we are using the popular dotenv package to load a .env file and allow you to make use of them in the application.

You can run cp .env-example.env .env (or just create a new .env file) and populate it with any values needed. I advise not committing the .env file to the repository (it is currently included in the .gitignore file).

Running the project locally

As Dev

Running the project using nodemon pointing at the entrypoint file (in our case src/index.ts) will run the project with an active 'file watcher'. Whenever a file is changed the project will restart itself.

yarn
yarn dev

As Build

Alternatively, you can do a 'clean build', compiling the Typescript files in to Javascript files to the ./dist directory and serve the build project.

This is similar to what the Dockerfile will be doing when building the final image to be used. The other major difference by default is that the Dockerfile will be doing a clean install of 'production only' dependencies.

yarn
yarn clean - Clean your local project of old build files
yarn build - Compile the project .ts to .js files
yarn serve - Serve the project

Alternatively you can use the 'all in one' command...

yarn
yarn clean:build:serve

Running the project with Docker

You can also build and run the docker image with the below commands.

docker build -t me/ts-express-template .

docker run \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  --name ts-express-app \
  --env-file .env \
    me/ts-express-template

hexnaught/typescript-project-template