Template for new services based on Express and Typescript with the Best Practices and Ready for Production

Motivation

Starting a new service in NodeJS can be a bit frustrating; there are lots of considerations to ensure we have a solid foundation to build upon. The primary goal of this template is to provide a robust base configuration for our NodeJS services, enabling us to deploy to production quickly and effectively.

What is Included in This Template?

• Fully dockerized service ready for both development and production environments, prioritizing performance and minimal image size.
• Utilizes SWC for compiling and testing the service.
• Configured with Express as the HTTP framework.
• Integrated with Husky to maintain code quality throughout development, including:
  • Running linter on modified files
  • Adopting conventional commits for consistency
  • Automatically executing tests
  • Checking for type errors using Typescript
  • Identifying grammatical typos
• Testing capabilities with Vitest and Supertest for unit and e2e tests.
• Performance testing through k6.
• Combines unit and e2e test coverage, providing a holistic view of our tests.
• Defines custom path aliases, allowing intuitive imports, e.g., using ‘@shared/logger’ instead of relative paths.
• CICD setup with GitHub Actions, ensuring good code quality with valuable insights on dependencies and vulnerabilities.
• Encourages the use of ESModules over CommonJS, embracing JavaScript standards.

Other Templates

If you’re considering starting new projects in other frameworks or creating a sophisticated library, explore these related templates:

• Template for new Typescript Libraries
• Template for new NestJS Services
• Template for new GitHub Actions based on NodeJS

Developing

To get started, create your .env file by duplicating the example:

bash
cp .env.example .env

This project is fully dockerized. To launch the app in development mode, run:

bash
docker-compose up -d my-service-dev

This mode supports hot-reload and exposes a debug port (9229), enabling IDE connections. For example, if you’re using VSCode, create a .vscode/launch.json file with this configuration:

{
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "type": "node",
      "request": "attach",
      "name": "Attach to docker",
      "restart": true,
      "port": 9229,
      "remoteRoot": "app"
    }
  ]
}

To run in production mode, execute:

bash
docker-compose up -d my-service-production

The service includes a health endpoint to verify functionality:

bash
curl --request GET --url http://localhost:3000/health

To stop the service, run:

bash
docker-compose down

Building

bash
npm run build

Testing

The service has various scripts for testing:

• Run all tests: npm run test
• Run unit tests: npm run test:unit
• Run e2e tests: npm run test:e2e
• For performance testing with k6, use:
• Via Docker: docker-compose up k6
• From your machine: brew install k6 and then npm run test:performance

Linting

To check code with the linter, run:

bash
npm run lint

To fix lint issues automatically, apply:

bash
npm run lint:fix

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any issues during setup or execution, consider the following:

• Ensure that your Docker environment is correctly installed and running.
• Check that your .env file is configured properly.
• Ensure your installed Node.js version matches the version required in this template.
• Look at any error logs generated in your container for specific errors.
• For unexpected behaviors, try stopping and restarting your docker containers.

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