API Starter

A progressive Node.js framework for building efficient and scalable server-side applications, heavily inspired by Angular.

Table of Contents:

1. Description
2. Prerequisites
3. Deployment
4. Environment Configuration
5. Choosing a Web Framework
6. HTTP2
7. Choosing a Database
8. Testing
9. TypeDocs
10. Logs

🔎 This repo was created with Nx.

📚 Description

This boilerplate is made to quickly prototype backend applications. It comes with authentication/authorization, logging, crud features and database persistence out of the box.

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🛠️ Prerequisites

Non Docker

• Please make sure to have Node.js (16+) locally by downloading the Javascript runtime via brew, choco, or apt-get.

• Please make sure to have MYSQL locally by deploying a web server stack like XAMPP. The control panel can then trigger MYSQL to start on localhost. MYSQL can be downloaded standalone via brew, choco, or apt-get.

Docker 🐳

• Please make sure to have Docker Desktop operational to quickly compose the required dependencies. Then follow the docker procedure outlined below.

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🚀 Deployment

Manual Deployment without Docker

• Clone the repo via git clone https://github.com/msanvarov/nest-rest-typeorm-boilerplate.

• Download dependencies via npm i or yarn.

• Create a .env file via the cp .env.example .env command and replace the existing environment variable placeholders with valid responses.

• Start the api in development mode by using npm run start (the app will be exposed on http://localhost:3333; not to conflict with React, Angular, or Vue ports).

Optional deployment of the UI

• This repo comes with a UI built with Angular - that can be accessed via http://localhost:4200.

• To start the UI, start a new terminal window and run npm run start --project ui.

Remark: In the docker deployment, the UI is automatically started and served by the API.

Deploying with Docker 🐳

• Execute the following command in-app directory:

# creates and loads the docker container in detached mode with the required configuration
$ docker-compose up -d

• The following command will download dependencies and execute the web application on http://localhost:80 (deployed behind a Nginx reverse proxy).

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🔒 Environment Configuration

By default, the application comes with a config module that can read in every environment variable from the .env file.

APP_ENV - the application environment to execute as, either in development or production. Determines the type of logging options to utilize. Options: development or production.

WEBTOKEN_ENCRYPTION_KEY - the key to encrypt/decrypt web tokens with. Make sure to generate a random alphanumeric string for this.

WEBTOKEN_EXPIRATION_TIME - the time in seconds when the web token will expire; by default, it's 2400 seconds which is 40 mins.

DB_TYPE - the type of database connection to use.

DB_USERNAME - username for authenticating against the database.

DB_PASSWORD - password for authenticating against the database, can be left empty if a password is not needed (not safe).

DB_HOST - the endpoint where this database sits (default is localhost but can be set explicitly).

DB_PORT - default ports for different types of database connections.

DB_DATABASE - the actual database name to perform operations on.

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🏗 Choosing a Web Framework

This boilerplate comes with Fastify out of the box as it offers performance benefits over Express. But the Express adapter is still accessible on a different branch.

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💾 Choosing a Database

By default MYSQL/MariaDB are the database of choice but TypeORM supports other database types like SQLite, Postgres, MongoDB, and MSSQL. To use anything other than MYSQL/MariaDB, change the configuration in the .env file, and download the corresponding wrapper library, like SQLite3.

Check https://typeorm.io/ for supported database types.

Remark: For MongoDB, TypeORM is not as feature-rich as Mongoose. Thus, I created a boilerplate for Nest and Mongoose.

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🦾 HTTP/2

Luckily, Fastify can enable HTTP2 over either HTTPS (h2) or plaintext (h2c) out of the box. This boilerplate makes use of this on the feat/http2 branch where a self-signed certificate was created for testing this capability. The certificate is located in the certs folder. For production, please use a valid certificate.

The self signed certificate can be generated via OpenSSL:

$ openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout api-key.pem -out api-cert.pem -days 365 -nodes

Remark: Express can be ran with HTTP/2 by employing the spdy library.

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✅ Testing

Docker 🐳

# Start the docker container if it's not running
$ docker start nest-rest-typeorm-api

# unit tests
$ docker exec -it nest-rest-typeorm-api npm run test

Non-Docker

# execute test
$ npm run test

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💡 TypeDocs

The documentation for this boilerplate can be found on Github pages.

The docs can be generated on-demand, by typing npm run typedocs:api:start. This will produce a docs/api folder with the required front-end files and start hosting on localhost.

Remark: The docs for the ui are generated on-demand, by typing npm run typedocs:ui:start. This will produce a docs/ui folder with the required front-end files and start hosting on localhost.

# generate docs for api code
$ npm run typedocs:api:start

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📝 Open API

Out of the box, the web app comes with Swagger; an open api specification, that is used to describe RESTful APIs. Nest provides a dedicated module to work with it.

The configuration for Swagger can be found at this location.

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✨ TypeORM

TypeORM is an object-relational mapping that acts as an abstraction layer over operations on databases. Please view the documentation for further details.

The configuration for TypeORM can be found in the app module.

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🔊 Logs

This boilerplate comes with a Winston module for extensive logging, the configurations for Winston can be found in the app module.

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🏗️ Progress

Branches	Status
main	✅
feat/*	🚧

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👥 Contribution

PRs are appreciated, I fully rely on the passion ❤️ of the OS developers.

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License

Nest is MIT licensed.

Author