TypeORM REST Scaffold

A nodejs library built on top of expressjs. It generates an expressjs handler function that can find or create a row in a table through TypeORM in response to a GET or POST request. It’s a quick way to get an express rest endpoint that directly matches a model without writing much code.

For example to GET a user, we would normally write an express handler to:

1. Find a user,
2. Return the data if available,
3. Redirect to an error page if something goes wrong.

Using typeorm-rest-scaffold, we would instead call just call typeorm-rest-scaffond’s ServiceBuilder, pass it your model name and generate a handler function that will do all this with one line of code:

  app.get('/:id', ServiceBuilder.findOne(User, ["id"]) ) // Route to find one user, accepting id as a parameter

How to use

The first thing to do is setup a TypeORM project. With TypeORM installed, an easy way to do this is to run “typeorm init”:

$ mkdir typeormtest
$ typeorm init

Next install express:

$ npm install --save express

Pull in typeorm-express-rest-scaffold as well:

$ npm install --save https://github.com/alterlife/typeorm-express-rest-scaffold.git

Finally, create a model and update the index.ts file to register the TypeORM model as a route. In the example here we use a model called “User”:

import "reflect-metadata";
import {createConnection} from "typeorm";
import {User} from "./entity/User";
import { ServiceBuilder } from 'typeorm-express-rest-scaffold'

createConnection().then(async connection => {
  
  const express = require('express')
  const app = express()
  const port = 3000

  app.get('/:id', ServiceBuilder.findOne(User, ["id"]) ) // Route to find one user, accepting id as a parameter
  app.get('/:firstname', ServiceBuilder.findAll(User, ["firstName"]) ) // Route to all users given a first name.

  app.listen(port, () => console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`))

}).catch(error => console.log(error));

You now have a REST service that can find Users by ID and firstName.

View Code on Github