NESTJS.markdown

NestJS

With the use of NestJS it's easy to implement an GRPC Microservice (example). But as you can see you have a lot of boilerplating to define your GRPC interfaces correctly. This approach works fine but is a bit tricky, because it doesn't support type checks. If you change your proto file you also need to update your interface.

By using ts-proto you have strong type checks and compiler errors!

To generate .ts files for your .proto files you can use the --ts_proto_opt=nestJs=true option.

Naming convention

For each service in your .proto file we generate two TypeScript interfaces: one to implement in your NestJS controller, and another one for the client code.

The name of the controller interface is based on the name of the service inside the .proto.

If we have to following .proto file:

syntax = "proto3";

package hero;

service HeroService {
    rpc FindOneHero (HeroById) returns (Hero) {}
    rpc FindOneVillain (VillainById) returns (Villain) {}
    rpc FindManyVillain (stream VillainById) returns (stream Villain) {}
}

The controller interface name would be HeroServiceController. The client interface name would be HeroServiceClient.

implementation

To implement the TypeScript file in your NestJS project you need to implement the controller interface in your controller. We also generate a class decorator factory for you controller (for example: @HeroServiceControllerMethods()), when you apply this to your controller we add all the method decorators you normally should do, but doing it this way is safer.

For the client we simply pass the client interface to the client.getService<?>() method (see below).

Note: Based on the .proto we'll generate a const (for example: HERO_PACKAGE_NAME and HERO_SERVICE_NAME), this way your code will break if you change your package or service name later. It's safer to have compiler errors than runtime errors!

Controller

// ...
import { HeroById, Hero, HeroServiceController, VillainById, Villain, HeroServiceControllerMethods } from '../hero';
import { Ctx, Payload } from '@nestjs/microservices';

@Controller('hero')
// Generated decorator that applies all the @GrpcMethod and @GrpcStreamMethod to the right methods
@HeroServiceControllerMethods()
export class HeroController implements HeroServiceController {
  private readonly heroes: Hero[] = [
    { id: 1, name: 'Stephenh' },
    { id: 2, name: 'Iangregsondev' },
  ];

  private readonly villains: Villain[] = [
    { id: 1, name: 'John' },
    { id: 2, name: 'Doe' },
  ];

  async findOneHero(data: HeroById): Promise<Hero> {
    return this.heroes.find(({ id }) => id === data.id)!;
  }

  async findOneVillain(
    @Payload() data: VillainById,
    @Ctx() metadata: Metadata,
  ): Promise<Villain> {
    return this.villains.find(({ id }) => id === data.id)!;
  }

  findManyVillain(request: Observable<VillainById>): Observable<Villain> {
    const hero$ = new Subject<Villain>();

    const onNext = (villainById: VillainById) => {
      const item = this.villains.find(({ id }) => id === villainById.id);
      hero$.next(item);
    };
    const onComplete = () => hero$.complete();
    request.subscribe(onNext, null, onComplete);

    return hero$.asObservable();
  }
}

Client

// ...
import { HeroById, Hero, HeroServiceController, HeroesServiceClient, HERO_SERVICE_NAME, HERO_PACKAGE_NAME } from '../hero';

@Injectable()
export class AppService implements OnModuleInit {
  private heroesService: HeroesServiceClient;

  constructor(@Inject(HERO_PACKAGE_NAME) private client: ClientGrpc) {}

  onModuleInit(): void {
    this.heroesService = this.client.getService<HeroesServiceClient>(HERO_SERVICE_NAME);
  }

  getHero(): Observable<Hero> {
    return this.heroesService.findOne({ id: 1 });
  }
}

Supported options

• With--ts_proto_opt=addGrpcMetadata=true, the last argument of service methods will accept the grpc Metadata type, which contains additional information with the call (i.e. access tokens/etc.).

  (Requires nestJs=true.)

• With--ts_proto_opt=addNestjsRestParameter=true, the last argument of service methods will be a rest parameter with type any. This way you can use custom decorators you could normally use in nestjs.

  (Requires nestJs=true.)

• With --ts_proto_opt=nestJs=true, the defaults will change to generate NestJS protobuf friendly types & service interfaces that can be used in both the client-side and server-side of NestJS protobuf implementations.

• With --ts_proto_opt=exportCommonSymbols=false, the plugin will not generate the export with the specified package name.