NestJS starter app

Introduction

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,
• 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,

Set up

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

Test

To execute tests, run

docker exec -it app npm run test

Debug

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.

REPL

The repl 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 repl or:

docker exec -it app npm run repl

It uses the code from dist folder.

The ts version allows you to run repl without compiling typescript beforehand. It uses the code from src. There are two ways to run it. The npm run ts-repl script allows you to write typescript code in the REPL. The npm run repl-from-src script does not give you typescript in REPL but allows top-level await like regular npm run repl.

The ts-repl is not working correctly because TypeScript does not see the registered global variables. Maybe there is a way around this.

Env variables

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.