I am abandoning this project and NestJS in general. There are too many decorators, too much boilerplate code, slow startup, unnecessary OOP design patterns, too much magic.
Angular is dreaded for a reason. The same reason(s) applies here. I'm gonna try fastify with knex, or the knex alternative: https://github.com/koskimas/kysely. The only thing that I'm missing in knex are model relations.
Don't use Nest. I'm seriously.
This is a boilerplate NestJS app based on the opinions from the Nest documentation, plus some additional ones. The purpose of this repository is similar to the very useful nestjs-realworld-example-app.
This repository was inspired by the amazing Laravel framework. Some features that are included in Laravel, are also implemented in this repository. Current features are:
- Database migrations (TypeORM sync feature),
- Entity (model) factories, used mainly for testing purposes,
- Custom seeding feature,
- REPL that has the application context ready for use (ard),
- Local and google authentication,
- Basic pagination functionality,
- Separate database setup for dev/prod and tests,
- Separate configuration per module,
- Validation setup done for validating requests,
- Implemented trim strings functionality (not mandatory for a backend API),
- E2E tests setup done that include hitting the sqlite database,
- Docker setup done,
Some smaller features also, check out the shared module.
TODO:
- websocket,
- mail,
- image upload,
- auth with facebook,
- queue,
- translation,
- swagger,
Would be useful at some point:
- cache,
Clone this project, then run
docker-compose run app npm install
Copy .env.example to .env, generate a unique string that will be used for JWT encoding and decoding and set it as the JWT_SECRET variable.
Start the app in watch and debug mode with
docker-compose up
Create database tables while docker-compose is up
docker exec -it app npm run typeorm schema:sync
Seed some data
docker exec -it app node scripts/seed.js
To execute tests, run
docker exec -it app npm run test
With docker-compose up the app starts with debug mode. So you can just run the Attach to docker task and debug the app. This task is defined in .vscode/launch.json as well as some other debugging tasks.
The ard script gives you an environment to tinker with your app and it gives you top-level await. It registers the app instance, repositories, entity classes and the factory function globally so you can easily access and use it. There is a js version and a ts version.
The js version needs the app to be compiled first with tsc or nest build, but then you can run it without waiting for typescript compilation. Run it with npm run ard or:
docker exec -it app npm run ard
It uses the code from dist folder.
The ts version allows you to run ard without compiling typescript beforehand. It uses the code from src. There are two ways to run it. The npm run ts-ard script allows you to write typescript code in the REPL. The npm run ard-from-src script does not give you typescript in REPL but allows top-level await like regular npm run ard.
The ts-ard is not working correctly because TypeScript does not see the registered global variables. Maybe there is a way around this.
There is one important environment variable that impacts the app setup - NODE_ENV. Default value is "develop". Running tests will set NODE_ENV to "test". The only difference at the moment is that test env will use .env.test instead of .env.