Starting a new ActionHero project couldn't be easier. Let's start by installing the command line tool
npm install -g actionhero
which you only need to do once. And we'll also make a folder for our project:
mkdir thumbsvc
cd thumbsvc
actionhero generate
npm install
Now, QuickTime screen recording takes a lot of CPU and really drags down npm install. I'm going to pause the video to let npm complete so we don't have to sit through this.
ActionHero isn't the only library we want for our project. I also installed sequelize for data storage, with the sqlite plugin. That will let us develop locally without worrying about database servers, but upgrade to MySQL or Postgres later with just a config change.
I installed GraphicsMagick to process our images, Bluebird because even though ES6 has native Promises I still occasionally use Bluebird's extended features, and node-request for retrieving images from remote servers. Fair warning, this last module, find-remove, is synchronous-only and not actively maintained by its author. I'm using it to save time in this video, but would not recommend it for a production service.
npm install --save actionhero sequelize sqlite3 gm bluebird request find-remove
npm install --save-dev chai dirty-chai
Finally, I also intalled chai and dirty chai, in dev-only, for unit testing. This video will target Node 7.x and higher, which supports ecmascript 6. However, ActionHero itself officially supports Node versions back to 4.x, so you can absolutely use an older version if you prefer.
I've taken the time to set up my IDE for this project, so let's take a
look at its structure. As you can see, actionhero generate gave us
everything we need to get started, but only five of these folders are
really critical right now:
actions are where we put our API call handlers config is where we adjust our server settings initializers is for our middleware, such as our database and image processing code tasks is where we'll put our scheduled cache cleanup code and finally tests is obviously where our tests go.
We want to start by stubbing out our API, and we could do this manually in the actions folder. But ActionHero also lets us generate these from the command line, so we could do it this way as well:
actionhero generate action --name=createVariant
actionhero generate action --name=apiKey
actionhero generate action --name=db
actionhero generate action --name=image
actionhero generate action --name=tracking
So far so good.
actionhero generate task --name=expireFiles --queue=default
actionhero generate initializer --name=apiKey
actionhero generate initializer --name=db
actionhero generate initializer --name=image
actionhero generate initializer --name=tracking
There are a few more useful commands we can run as well:
actionhero actions list
actionhero console
actionhero tasks enqueue --name=XYZ --args=JSONARGS