ericclemmons/polydev

Faster, route-centric development for Node.js apps with built-in Hot Module Replacement.

Rationale

As your project grows, working on a large or monolithic Node.js app gets slower:

• Working on part of the app means running the entire app.
• The require tree grows so large it can take several seconds to start the server.
• Restarting the server on every change impedes development.
• Middleware for projects like Next.js & Storybook are expensive to restart with each change.
• Tools like concurrently, nodemon, & piping still run the entire app.
• You shouldn't waste time in the terminal hitting Ctrl-C and restarting.

Features

• Fast startup.
• Hot Module Replacement built-in.
• Run only the parts of your app that's requested.
• Supports yarn workspaces.
• Pretty 404 screens with the option to create the missing route.
• Pretty 500 screens, so you spend less time in the terminal.
• Iterative adoption, so it's easy to get started.

Quick Started

1. Install

   yarn add polydev --dev

2. Run polydev

   yarn run polydev --open

For customizing the node runtime, you can use NODE_OPTIONS.

For example, TypeScript can be enabled via ts-node:

polydev --require ts-node/register
# Or
NODE_OPTIONS="--require ts-node/register" polydev

Defining routes

The routes folder is similar to Old-Time™ HTML & PHP, where folders mirror the URL structure, followed by an index.js file:

• routes/

  • page/[id]/index.js

    Has access to req.params.id for /page/123.

  • contact-us/

    • index.get.js
    • index.post.js

  • posts/index.*.js

    Responds to both GET & POST for /posts/*.

  • index.js

    Responds to both GET & POST for /.

Route Handlers

Route handlers can be any of the following:

1. Functional middleware:

   module.exports = (req, res) => {
     res.send("Howdy there!")
   }

2. Express apps:

   const express = require("express")
   
   module.exports = express().get("/", (req, res) => {
     res.send(`Howdy from ${req.path}!`)
   })

3. A yarn workspace package:

   module.exports = require("my-package-name")

4. A package.json path:

   module.exports = require.resolve("my-app/package.json")

   These are considered stand-alone apps that will be ran via yarn dev or yarn start (whichever exists) for development only.

   This is good for when you want to have a separate API server open on process.env.PORT that's not part of your application.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Author

• Eric Clemmons