Full Stack JavaScript Strategies

Chapter 2. Setting Up the Backend

You’ve got all your tickets ready to go, and you can assume you’ve been tasked with building the bones of the backend. The framework of choice at your company is NestJS. Don’t worry if you’ve never seen NestJS or even heard of it before. The docs for it are good, and you’ll have other code you can reference. Reach out to other developers to see why certain architecture and design decisions have been made on existing backends.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about:

• Making architecture decisions for the backend

• Checking the app to make sure it runs after initial setup

• Writing the initial documentation

These tasks are all crucial to ensuring that development is able to run smoothly as both the Product and the dev team grow and change over time. Everything that you build on the backend will start from the foundation you set here, so take your time to thoroughly discuss options with your team.

Why NestJS?

Before we dive too deep into the weeds, let’s discuss why NestJS is a solid choice. It’s basically like a backend architecture in a box. As soon as you initialize the app, you immediately have access to validation, authentication, routing, controllers, data schema, and a lot of other functionality. Instead of you having to piece everything together, NestJS gives you everything you need to make a scalable backend from the beginning. That does mean it’s a little less flexible in how you organize it, but that’s the trade-off for all the up-front ...