Getting Started with NestJS: A Beginner’s Tutorial

NestJS is a modern and progressive framework for building server-side applications. It is built on top of TypeScript and provides a robust platform for developing scalable and efficient applications. In this tutorial, we will walk through the process of building a simple REST API using NestJS.

Step 1: Install NestJS and create a new project

To get started with NestJS, you’ll need to have Node.js and npm installed on your machine. Once you have those, you can install the Nest CLI by running the following command in your terminal:

css

npm i -g @nestjs/cli

Once the Nest CLI is installed, you can create a new project by running the following command:

javascript

nest new my-api

This will create a new NestJS project in a directory called “my-api”.

Step 2: Define a simple REST endpoint

In this tutorial, we will create a simple REST endpoint that returns a list of books. To do this, we will first create a controller. To do this, run the following command in your terminal:

nest generate controller books

This will create a new controller in the “books” directory. We can now define our REST endpoint in this controller. Open the “books.controller.ts” file and add the following code:

kotlin

import { Controller, Get } from '@nestjs/common';

@Controller('books')
export class BooksController {
  @Get()
  findAll() {
    return [{ title: 'The Great Gatsby' }, { title: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' }];
  }
}

This code defines a simple REST endpoint that returns a list of books when a GET request is sent to the “/books” endpoint.

Step 3: Start the server and test the endpoint

Now that we have defined our REST endpoint, we can start the server and test it. To do this, run the following command in your terminal:

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npm run start

This will start the server and you should be able to access the endpoint by sending a GET request to “http://localhost:3000/books“. To do this, you can use a tool like Postman or curl. You should see the list of books returned in the response.

Step 4: Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have shown how to get started with NestJS and build a simple REST API. NestJS provides a robust platform for building server-side applications and offers many benefits over traditional server-side frameworks. We hope this tutorial has provided a good starting point for you to start building your own applications with NestJS.