dotenv VS fastify

This is the second part of my Test Driving a Rails API series. In Part 1 we set up our development environment, generated a Rails API-only application, installed dotenv to easily store configuration values in the environment, and installed and configured PostgreSQL version 16 as our database.

Storing environment variables for a Rails app can be problematic. The dotenv gem will automatically, when Rails boots, load environment variables from .env files into the Rails ENV. This is a great way to store private information that varies per developer or deployment environment, such as your development database configuration. Rails Encrypted Credentials is a great way to store private information, like API keys, etc, but I wouldn’t use it for storing my local development environment’s database information. The Encrypted Credentials file is checked into the git repository and would, therefore, be shared by all developers on the project. dotenv allows each developer or deployment environment to store their own information in .env files that are ignored by git.

dotenv

Install the dotenv gem.

dotenv-rails

Yeah, now that I think of it, it does require a gem. I have used this in most projects https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv

For example, Fastify removed the instanceof operatorfrom its codebase because it was causing problems for those developers that rely on jest as a testing framework.

Both are frameworks but NextJs is for Forntend (web app in browser that use ReactJs under the hood) and NestJs is for Backend (server app running on a server witch use Express or Fastify). The only thing similar between them is the typed language in which they were written.

Restify & Fastify Hapi

Let's create a sample Node API project we can work with throughout to build a new docker image. We will leverage Fastify to create an API that we configure via the fastify-cli.

Fastify

In setting out to build this service, we wanted to use gRPC for its APIs. We’ve been reaching for REST when building APIs so far, primarily out of necessity, i.e., our public APIs needed auto-generated client SDKs and docs for developers working with them. We built those APIs with Fastify and Typebox but felt burned by a code-first approach to generating an OpenAPI spec. I’ll spare you the details and save that experience/learning for another article. Suffice it to say we love gRPC’s schema-first approach. This blog post summarizes our feelings well

Fastify – Fast and Low overhead web framework

Custom Functions are powered by Fastify (a light-weight Node.js framework that claims to be faster than Express.js), so they’re extremely flexible.