heft-fastify-tutorial

heft-fastify-tutorial

This project folder demonstrates a sample configuration of the Heft build system. It illustrates how you can build and test a Fastify web server or REST API using Heft.

In this example, running rushx build automatically compiles, lints, and runs unit tests, using:

• TypeScript compiler
• ESLint coding style validator
• Jest test runner

Please see the Getting started with Heft article for more information.

Local development

Normally when working on a Fastify application, you might use a command like fastify start --watch, so that you can continuously make code changes locally and then test them in your browser.

Instead, we'll rely on Heft's node-service support, which will watch for changes in our source code, recompile, and then restart the local fastify server.

rushx start

Then navigate in your browser to http://localhost:3000 to see the sample app. Make a change in the /src folder to automatically recompile and restart your server.

Web sites, APIs, and static content

This project includes two different types of content: classic "web server" (where the server is returning finished HTML for display to the browser) and an API (where the server is returning JSON data, which might then be consumed by a web client written in React or Vue, etc., in the browser).

For the classic HTML approach, this project uses .ejs templates, whereas for APIs, it returns JSON content right from the Fastify request handler. In both cases, example unit tests are provided that check the responses using Jest's .toMatchSnapshot().

In this example, .ejs and .css files aren't intended to be compiled, so during the typescript build they are copied directly into the /lib folder along with the rest of the content (this is configured in config/typescript.json).

Docker

Eventually, we'll need to deploy our application to the internet somewhere. Building a docker image is often the first step towards then deploying up to a container service like Fargate, Kubernetes, etc.

A sample Dockerfile is included in this project. To build a docker image from a Rush project, we'll start with a node base image, check out our project, build it, deploy it (using rush deploy), then bake a final image with the contents of the deploy (discarding the rest of the monorepo we don't need for our application).

If you have docker installed locally, you can build the image:

rushx build:docker

After a couple minutes, this will build a docker image tagged heft-fastify-tutorial.

Start it up locally, and confirm it is running:

docker run -it --rm -d -p 8080:80 --name test heft-fastify-tutorial
docker container list

Now navigate in your browser to http://localhost:8080. You should see the same tutorial app you saw when running the fastify-cli version.

Stop the running docker container with:

docker kill test