Reviewing the NodeJS ecosystem, there seem to be many competing tools for similar functionality — Knex vs Waterline vs Sequelize for ORMs; Sails vs Express vs Trails vs for base frameworks; db-migrate vs sails-migrations vs Knex migration support for database migrations; etc.
Coming from the Rails world, where there is (relative) consensus on tools, this is a bit overwhelming.
Basically, I'm looking for a toolchain that supports the following features:
- Database migrations
- Good PostgreSQL support
- ORM
- Supports building JSON APIs
- Secrets management (nconf seems promising...)
Ergonomically, I look for the following:
- Integrated — pieces should easily play well together
- MVC-ish (the 'V' in this case is JSON, but still...)
- Production-safe (specifically for SQL DBs — seems like a lot of NodeJS tuts assume NoSQL DBs, and thus ignore stuff like schema versioning & migrations)
I've been messing around with SailJS, and like some of the ideas behind it, but find it's lacking everything SQL-specific (or at least, there doesn't seem to be a consensus on how to handle migrations, etc).
What toolchain would you NodeJS devs out there recommend, given the above? Any and all help would be appreciated here!
Top comments (3)
I think key is coming from Rails world. Rails Ruby world tends to be very opinionated approach to doing this... i.e. "Rails" as the analogy. If you follow the rails standard set of tech stack, all the key tech decisions are already made.
But in Node.JS world, they take a slightly different approach. They intentionally try to be less opinionated. Therefore, there are just about so many options in every layer of the stack.
It can be intimating to try to make so many decisions right at the beginning. But you can do piece meal, and if you play with a library or something, and you don't like it, you can just switch to one of the MANY competing tech/library/tool.
Yeah, that's kinda what I was worried about :D
I get the thinking behind it, and totally understand why many folks prefer the almost unix-y approach of small, separated tools, that you can combine as you choose. For me, developer productivity is a key consideration, and having consensus, battle-tested tools like those in the Rails world naturally fosters said productivity. Also makes it really easy to find answers to questions :)
So far, here is the stack I'm playing with, given some recommendations from another developer community:
Express + body-parser (JSON API support)
Knex (Database interface)
Knex + knex-migrate (migrations)
Bookshelf (ORM)
pg (PostgreSQL support)
mocha + chai + chai-http (API testing)
morgan (logging)
gulp (task runner)
(Open to suggestions if anyone prefers other tools)
In comparison, the same functionality in Rails looks like this:
rspec + webmock (API testing)
Rails (Everything else)
I also find myself writing lots of cli scripts that rails has built in, such as a console/repl that loads app files, DB creation scripts, DB seed scripts (Knex's built-in seed functionality doesn't work if seed order matters — important for relational data).
Anyway, seeing how spoiled I was in the Rails world :)
You might want to look into Adonis