Goal

• TypeScript controllers and models as the single source of truth for your API
• A valid swagger spec is generated from your controllers and models, including:
  • Paths (e.g. GET /Users)
  • Definitions based on TypeScript interfaces (models)
  • Parameters/model properties marked as required or optional based on TypeScript (e.g. myProperty?: string is optional in the Swagger spec)
  • jsDoc supported for object descriptions (most other metadata can be inferred from TypeScript types)
• Routes are generated for middleware of choice
  • Express currently included, other middleware can be supported using a simple handlebars template
  • Validate request payloads

Philosophy

• Rely on TypeScript type annotations to generate API metadata if possible
• If regular type annotations aren't an appropriate way to express metadata, use decorators
• Use jsdoc for pure text metadata (e.g. endpoint descriptions)
• Minimize boilerplate
• Models are best represented by interfaces (pure data structures), but can also be represented by classes

How it works

Create Controllers

// controllers/usersController.ts

import {Get, Route} from 'tsoa';
import {UserService} from '../services/userService';
import {User, UserCreationRequest} from '../models/user';

@Route('Users')
export class UsersController {
    @Get('{id}')
    public async getUser(id: number): Promise<User> {
        return await new UserService().get(id);
    }

    @Post()
    public async createUser(request: UserCreationRequest): Promise<User> {
        return await new UserService().create(reqest);
    }
}

Create Models

// models/user.ts

export interface User {
    id: number;
    email: string;
    name: Name;
    status?: string;
    phoneNumbers: string[];
}

export interface Name {
    first: string;
    last?: string;
}

export interface UserCreationRequest {
    email: string;
    name: Name;
    phoneNumbers: string[];
}

Generate

From command line/npm script:

// generate swagger.json
tsoa swagger

// generate routes
tsoa routes

See CLI documentation

Consume generated routes

import * as methodOverride from 'method-override';
import * as express from 'express';
import * as bodyParser from 'body-parser';
import {RegisterRoutes} from './routes';

// controllers need to be referenced in order to get crawled by the generator
import './controllers/usersController';

const app = express();
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(methodOverride());

RegisterRoutes(app);

app.listen(3000);

Get access to the request object of express in Controllers

To access the request object of express in a controller method use the @Request-decorator:

// controllers/usersController.ts

import * as express from 'express';
import {Get, Route, Request} from 'tsoa';
import {User, UserCreationRequest} from '../models/user';

@Route('Users')
export class UsersController {
    @Get('{id}')
    public async getUser(id: number, @Request() request: express.Request): Promise<User> {
        // TODO: implement some code that uses request as well
    }
}

Note that the parameter request does not appear in your swagger definition file. Likewise you can use the decorator @Inject to mark a parameter as being injected manually and should be omitted in swagger generation. In this case you should write your own custom template where you inject the needed objects/values in the method-call.

Use awesome Swagger tools

Now that you have a swagger spec (swagger.json), you can use all kinds of amazing tools that generate documentation, client SDKs, and more.

Installation

npm install tsoa --save

Command Line Interface

For information on the configuration object (tsoa.json), check out the following:

Configuration definition

Configuration sample

Swagger.json generation

Usage: tsoa swagger [options]

Options:
   --configuration, -c  tsoa configuration file; default is tsoa.json in the working directory [string]

Route generation

Usage: tsoa routes [options]

Options:
  --configuration, -c  tsoa configuration file; default is tsoa.json in the working directory [string]

Examples

An example project is available here