NestJS Hexagonal Architecture Example

Example of how to create a NestJS service using hexagonal architecture.

👀 Motivation

The main idea of this project is to show how we can create a NestJS service using the hexagonal architecture. Note that this repository is not a template for starting new projects so we will not keep it up to date in terms of dependencies, vulnerabilities or new practices, if you are looking for a new template we recommend you to check the project templates section.

🤩 Project templates

Are you thinking in start new projects in nestjs, other frameworks or create a super fancy library? I recommend you to check the following templates I have been working on:

• Template for new NestJS Services
• Template for new Typescript Libraries
• Template for new Typescript Express Services
• Template for new GitHub Actions based on NodeJS

🧑‍💻 Developing

First, we will need to create our .env file, we can create a copy from the example one:

cp .env.example .env

The project is fully dockerized 🐳, if we want to start the app in development mode, we just need to run:

docker-compose up -d my-service-dev

This development mode with work with hot-reload and exposing a debug port, the 9229, so later we can connect from our editor to it.

Now, you should be able to start debugging configuring using your IDE. For example, if you are using vscode, you can create a .vscode/launch.json file with the following configuration:

{
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "type": "node",
      "request": "attach",
      "name": "Attach to docker",
      "restart": true,
      "port": 9229,
      "remoteRoot": "/app"
    }
  ]
}

Also, if you want to run the production mode, you can run:

docker-compose up -d my-service-production

This service is providing just a health endpoint which you can call to verify the service is working as expected:

curl --request GET \
  --url http://localhost:3000/health

If you want to stop developing, you can stop the service running:

docker-compose down

⚙️ Building

npm run build

✅ Testing

The service provide different scripts for running the tests, to run all of them you can run:

npm run test

If you are interested just in the unit tests, you can run:

npm run test:unit

Or if you want e2e tests, you can execute:

npm run test:e2e

💅 Linting

To run the linter you can execute:

npm run lint

And for trying to fix lint issues automatically, you can run:

npm run lint:fix