Happy holidays developers ? Recently, I published Matterhorn ?, an API boilerplate project built with Node.js and TypeScript. The API server uses Fastify, a fast and low overhead web framework. The project comes with a configured type system (TypeScript), test runner (Jest), linter (TSLint), and even a CI pipeline (Azure DevOps).

This article will give a brief overview of the project and insights into certain design decisions.

Ethan-Arrowood/matterhorn
An API boilerplate project built on Node.js and TypeScript ? - Ethan-Arrowood/matterhorngithub.com

Overview

? Psst! This overview section is very similar to the project docs on GitHub

Get started quickly by following these steps:

  1. ? Fork the repository
  2. ?‍♀️ Clone it to your computer
  3. ?‍♀️ Run npm run install && npm run dev
  4. ? Edit any of the files in src/
  5. ? Watch as the app magically rebuilds and relaunches itself

✨ That’s it for the basic user guide. Now let’s dive into some of the commands available to you by default. All of the commands below can be run with npm run <script> . This project makes use of npm modules opn and rimraf to enable platform agnostic npm scripts.

  • build — build the TypeScript files and output to lib/
  • build:watch — automatically rebuild files if changes are detected in src/
  • clean — recursively delete the lib/ and coverage/ directories
  • clean:build — recursively delete the lib/ directory
  • clean:coverage — recursively delete the coverage/ directory
  • coverage — run the test suite and generate code coverage reports
  • coverage:open — run npm run coverage then open the results in a browser
  • dev — concurrently run build:watch and start:watch
  • lint — run the linter configured by TSLint on the src/ directory
  • start — run the app from lib/. Make sure to use npm run build first!
  • start:watch — relaunch the server if new changes are detected in lib/
  • test — run unit tests defined in the tests/ directory
  • test:ci — run unit tests and generate necessary files for CI integration

Command Line Arguments & Environment Variables

Matterhorn implements example usage of both command line arguments and environment variables. It uses yargs-parser to manage command line arguments. Command line arguments are passed in through the start command: node lib/index.js <command line arguments>.

The--log argument has been enabled as an example. Running npm run start starts up the project without any command line arguments. This command is intended to be used in production, so logging is disabled by default (i.e. we don’t pass the —-log argument).

If you are using this command to test your code locally and want to see the logging output, then run npm run start —- -—log. This passes the command line argument through npm and into the aliased command.

Environment variables work in a similar way to command line arguments. They can be set in multiple ways depending on the terminal and operating system you are using. In a bash terminal you can specify environment variables as you use any of the above mentioned scripts by prepending the assignment to the command.

For example, this project has the PORT environment variable enabled. In a bash terminal run PORT=8080 npm run start to run the API on port 8080.

Design Decisions

I built this project because I found myself constantly copying and pasting config files for new Node.js projects. I love what the create-react-app team has accomplished and envision Matterhorn developing into a similar kind of tool. Down the road, I look forward to developing a complete CLI to help developers get up and running with Node.js and TypeScript even quicker.

Matterhorn is an opinionated project. The build and linting systems are configured to my preferences, but are very easy to change. For example, in tslint.json I defined the "semicolon" rule as false — to enforce semicolon usage throughout the app, change this to true .

Additionally, this project contains an azure-pipelines.yml file. This defines the CI (continuous integration) pipeline on Azure DevOps, a robust tool offered by Microsoft to enable teams to plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster with a set of modern dev services. This was another opinionated decision due to my experience with the tool. There are many other great CI options such as Travis CI or Circle CI that I hope to support in the future.

Hope you enjoy!

Thank you for taking the time to read this article and checking out Matterhorn ?. The project is open sourced, and I encourage developers of any skill level to come contribute. Check it out on GitHub and if you want to hear about future updates as well as other things I develop follow me on Twitter.

Best wishes ? ~ Ethan Arrowood