Building an API with NestJS #1: Initial Setup

Introduction to NestJS

NestJS, according to the official website, is "a progressive Node.js framework for building efficient, reliable and scalable server-side applications." Compared with other frameworks like Express, NestJS is quite opinionated about how we should do something and how we should structure our code. This can be considered a good thing, especially if you don't have a lot of production experience since it forces us to follow best practices and keeping our code consistent.

Installing NestJS

You need to first install NestJS CLI if you haven't already.

npm i -g @nestjs/cli

Then, scaffold the project with the following command.

nest new <project-name>

If you want to have a stricter feature set, like I'm gonna do, use --strict flag like this:

nest new --strict <project-name>

The above command will generate a new project with the following structure.

If you want to start building right away, you can skip the next section. But, if you want to extend existing ESLint and Prettier config, e.g. using Airbnb's style guide, read on.

(Optional) Setup Airbnb's ESLint Config

As I have wrote previously, ESLint and Prettier are important to ensure that you have a good developer experience. I personally love Airbnb's style guide and that's why I always use it whenever I'm creating a new JavaScript/TypeScript project. Beside Airbnb, there are a couple widely used style guide such as standard and Google.

Since we're not using React, we're going to use eslint-config-airbnb-base instead of eslint-config-airbnb.

npx install-peerdeps --dev eslint-config-airbnb-base

What this command does is that it will install eslint-config-airbnb-base alongside eslint and eslint-plugin-import. Since we're using TypeScript, we need another library called eslint-config-airbnb-typescript for our linter to work.

npm i --save-dev eslint-config-airbnb-typescript

And that's it. You're done. Try running npx eslint "{src,apps,libs,test}/**/*.ts" and you're going to see results like this:

To automatically fix auto-fixable problems, run ESLint with --fix flag like this npx eslint "{src,apps,libs,test}/**/*.ts" --fix.

Another optional thing, you can add couple more plugins like eslint-plugin-promise, eslint-plugin-jest, or eslint-plugin-security if you want your styling to be more comprehensive.

In the next part of this series, I'm going to explain about husky and commitlint to further upgrade your developer experience. Stay tuned for more!