ActionHero VS cls-hooked

ActionHero.js is one of the most well-known API frameworks. It will help you quickly develop scalable and reusable Node.js API servers for your projects. ActionHero acts as a toolkit that will allow you to build such API servers that will initially work together with existing applications and platforms. With tens of thousands of users, you can always find the right answers and ideas to ensure a daily efficient workflow with ActionHero.

Two of the major components of the @grouparoo/core application are a Node.js API server and a React frontend. We use Actionhero as the API server, and Next.JS for our React site generator. As we develop the Grouparoo application, we are constantly adding new API endpoints and changing existing ones.

At Grouparoo, we use Actionhero as our Node.js API server and Sequelize for our Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool - making it easy to work with complex records from our database. Within our Actions and Tasks, we often want to treat the whole execution as a single database transaction - either all the modifications to the database will succeed or fail as a unit. This is really helpful when a single activity may create or modify many database rows.

Hard to say without knowing /what/ you want to accomplish in your CI process, so maybe some open source examples will help:

* A "complex" library (node-resque). In CI (CircleCI) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, test on 3 versions of node, and build docs. 4 min w/ some parallelization https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/actionhero/node-re...

* A web server framework (actionhero): In CI(Github Actions) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, test on 3 versions of node, and build docs. 7 min w/ some parallelization https://github.com/actionhero/actionhero/actions/runs/801273...

* A Monorepo (Grouparoo): In CI (CircleCI) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, run migrations, check licenses, test UIs, CLI tools, Plugins, and try out a few different databases. 5 minutes with rather extreme parallelization https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/grouparoo/grouparo...

Websockets are the answer. Checkout https://www.actionherojs.com/ for a framework that works great as game server.

1: for example - https://demo.actionherojs.com/swagger.html 2: https://github.com/actionhero/actionhero/pull/1671

The solution to our problem comes from a wonderful package called cls-hooked. Using the magic of AsyncHooks, this package can tell when certain code is within a callback chain or promise. In this way, you can say: "for all methods invoked within this async function, I want to keep this variable in scope". This is pretty wild! If you opt into using Sequelize with CLS-Hooked, every SQL statement will check to see if there is already a transaction in scope... You don't need to manually supply it as an argument!