ts-express / axel

At Enyosolutions, We are fans of sailsjs as a framework for nodejs projects. However over the years we've come accross some issues were painfull :

• Slow startup time (compared to pure express, even express with similar middlewares)
• No nested services / Controllers folders
• Complex to interact with express
• No support for the next option of express
• No support for error handlers
• No proper support for typescript

Also since we don't use waterline and websockets it was an unnecessary addition that slows startup time. Hence we started this project as an attempt to have a startup template for our projects that would support all the important features we like from sails without the rest (that could be made available in the future via a package).

Features

• Routes binding to controllers via config
• Merged configuration files
• Globally available axel (with controllers loaded inside)
• Globally available and merged configuration object
• Policies for routes (in route definitions and in policies file)
• Middleware auto wiring
• Websockets as a plugin
• Nested controllers
• Nested services we are not doing that. it's better to import services, to avoid polluting the global namespace.
• Loading models and wiring an entity manager.
• Connecting to the command line in order to sync models
• Generate bare controllers (connected to the crud controller)
• Generate mongoose controllers ?
• Move manager.ejs to axel folder, and enable the websocket only if config is enabled
• rename axel into trex ?

bugs

• typings are not correctly created after you import sequelize types, we need to delete them.
• Generated references in sequelize definitions can create cyclic dependencies. Delete them and define associations instead.
• Case issues when importing a model from database. We end up with underscore cased field, which is for some people not desirable (eslint/airbnb recommends camelCase)
• Url in schemas should be lower or snake cased

Quick Start

Get started developing...

# Install deps
npm install

# Setup environment
cp .env.test .env

# Create the local configuration file
cp api/src/config/local.js.dist api/src/config/local.js

# Connect to db and add token
vim api/src/config/local.js

# Run in development mode
npm run dev

# Run tests
npm run test

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Install Dependencies

Install all package dependencies (one time operation)

npm install

Setup environment

Create the .env file at the root (example can be found in the .env.test file).

Enter the MySQL database config and a token (for JSON Web Token) in api/src/config/local.js (sqldb section)

Synchronize

Run It

Run in development mode:

Runs the application is development mode. Should not be used in production

npm run dev

or debug it

npm run dev:debug

Run in production mode:

Starts it in production mode.

npm run start

Test It

Run the Mocha unit tests

npm test

or debug them

npm run test:debug

Try It

• Open you're browser to http://localhost:3000
• Invoke the /examples endpoint

  curl http://localhost:3000/api/v1/examples

Debug It

Debug the server:

npm run dev:debug

Debug Tests

npm run test:debug

Debug with VSCode

Add these contents to your .vscode/launch.json file