normanmunge / boilerplate-nodejs-typescript

SETTING UP TYPESCRIPT EXPRESS SERVER

Run the command npm init -y to create a package.json file.

Create a minimal server using Express

npm i express dotenv

• Create a directory called src and add a file called index.ts
• Create a .env file in your root folder. For security purposes, ensure you add this file to a .gitignore file to avoid exposing your environment variables.

Install typescript

• We install typescript as a dev dependency with additional @types declaration packages for Express and Node.js that offer type definitions in the form of declaration files.
• Run the command below for installation:

npm i -D typescript @types/express @types/node

• Generate a tsconfig.json to manage the project settings for your compiler. Run the command:

npx tsc --init

• Uncomment and Change the outDir in the tsconfig to ./dist
• Update the main field in package.json to dist/index.js
• Add the include and exclude objects in your tsconfig.json

"compilerOptions: {...}, "include": ["src/**/*.ts"], "exclude": ["node_modules"]

Watch file changes

• Install nodemon as a development utility package to detect file changes in your project.
• Install ts-node to enable code transpilation for working with the typescript code directly in the Node.Js environment

npm i -D nodemon ts-node

• After installing the dev dependencies, update the scripts in the package.json:

{ "scripts": { "build": "npx tsc", "start": "node dist/index.js", "dev": "nodemon src/index.ts" } }

Installing Other Dependencies

• The following libraries defined in your package.json are optional:

1. Axios - To call a route from another server eg mailgun server
2. Bcrypt - Encrypting and decrypting your data
3. Body-parser - Converting data into JSON format
4. Cors - Security mechanism that enables HTTP requests from browser
5. Express-validator - Security mechanism for validating data from client
6. Helmet - Security mechanism to add extra security protocols to your project
7. Http-errors - Enabling easier error handling for your routes
8. Jsonwebtoken - For token based authentication
9. Knex - ORM for your data models
10. Knex-paginate - Enabling pagination of data coming from database
11. PG - Postgres relational database
12. Mocha - Framework for automated testing
13. Chai - Framework for automated testing
14. Sinon - Framework for automated testing

• Incase they aren't needed in your project, you can uninstall them by running npm uninstall package-name

Resources

For a more detailed explanation, refer to this article: [https://blog.logrocket.com/how-to-set-up-node-typescript-express/]