We have our base project setup with Express, but what about connecting to a databse? We could just use raw SQL queries and that might be a good option for some project. Or we could use an ORM. An ORM, or Object Relational Mapper, is a library/framework that allows for the bi-directional mapping of your OOP model classes to relational database tables. It basically abstracts away SQL querying and result set mapping to our TypeScript models into a library to simplify our data access layer.
There are quite a few libraries/frameworks in the NodeJS world for building web applications. We’re going to take a look at one of the more popular ones, Express, and setup up our project to use Expresss with TypeScript. There is a plethora of ways to set up Express, but this is how I like to set it up.
Prerequisites Setting Up a Node & TypeScript Project - Initial Setup Setting Up a Node & TypeScript Project - Configure Jest Setting Up a Node & TypeScript Project - Configure Tooling OR Clone this github repository Installing Our Dependencies Lets get started by setting up our project with Express.
Something that I’ve noticed while working in the JavaScript ecosystem is the vast number of tools available to developers. Being a relatively new developer, this was very overwhelming at first. Fortunately, the majority of them are easy to setup and once you have them setup you won’t need to make changes to them frequently. Some of these tools allows for faster, more consistent development. With this next post we will be configuring some common tools used in Node/JavaScript development.
As many of you know unit testing is a very opinionated topic in software development. Most of my professional experience has been working on code bases where little to no unit testing was implemented. This can/has been a nightmare especially with semi-large, messy code bases. It becomes like a game of whack-a-mole where you change one thing and eight other things break (this is also partly due to not following DRY or SOLID principles).
This post is geared towards developers looking to start using TypeScript in their Node projects. Over this post and the subsequent posts we’ll be diving into setting up a Node project with Typescript from scratch. We’ll cover setting up a git reposotory, initializing the project with npm and tsc, setting up common tooling, configuring express, and accessing data from a database with TypeORM.
Prerequisites Install Node Install Git Setting Up The Initial Project First we will setup/initialize our git repository.
