Originally posted on ubiqueIoT
Parse Server is a great way to quickly spin up a backend for your project. Parse is a Node based utility that sits on top of ExpressJS.
It abstracts a lot of the backend code for us so we can spend more time focusing on the front end code.
In combination with Parse, Typescript can really shine when dealing with our routing and database calls.
Let's walk through how to set up a Parse Server project using Typescript.
First, start by cloning the Parse Server Example project in a directory of your choosing.
git clone https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server-example.git
Rename parse-server-example
directory to what ever you would like and open the folder in a code editor of your choice.
Install the dependencies:
npm install
Next, install the typescript compiler globally, if not already installed on your local machine.
sudo npm install -g typescript
We also need to install typescript to your project in order to compile the Javascript code on our Elasticbeanstalk instance.
npm install typescript
Install our types for the Parse project.
npm install @types/parse --save
Add a tsconfig.json
file to the root directory of your project with the following options:
{
"compilerOptions": {
"allowSyntheticDefaultImports" : true,
"module": "commonjs",
"esModuleInterop": false,
"target": "es2016",
"noImplicitAny": true,
"moduleResolution": "node",
"sourceMap": false,
"outDir": "dist",
"rootDir": "src",
"baseUrl": ".",
"allowJs": true,
"paths": {
"*": [
"node_modules/*",
"src/*"
]
}
},
"include": [
"src/**/*"
]
}
Make a src
folder in the root directory of this project.
Move the entire ./cloud
folder into ./src
.
Move index.js
into the ./src
folder.
Notice how this matches the path defined in the rootDir
tsconfig options.
Run a tsc
command in your terminal (make sure to have typescript installed globally).
If everything works as expected, a ./dist
folder should've been generated by the typescript compiler.
Finally, let's add the dist
folder to the ./.gitignore
file so that we can be sure our code is compiled on the server each time we deploy.
# Typescript
dist
Tell Parse where to find our compiled Typescript code
Open ./package.json
and update the start
script:
"start": "node ./dist/index.js",
Rename main.js
→ main.ts
and functions.js
→ functions.ts
.
Replace contents of functions.ts
with the following. We're just adding the any
type to the request parameter for now to shut up our compiler.
Parse.Cloud.define('hello', (req: any) => {
req.log.info(req);
return 'Hi';
});
Parse.Cloud.define('asyncFunction', async (req: any) => {
await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 1000));
req.log.info(req);
return 'Hi async';
});
Parse.Cloud.beforeSave('Test', () => {
throw new Parse.Error(9001, 'Saving test objects is not available.');
});
Run another tsc
command in your root directory to confirm everything compiles correctly. You should see your ./dist
folder filled javascript versions of your main
and functions
files.
Try starting the server with an npm run start
command.
If everything is working as expected, we should see the server start, then error out after ~30 seconds because Parse could not connect to a MongoDB instance.
We will configure the MongoDB Atlas instance in a future post.
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