typescript-starter VS serve-static

Let's say you want to create a new NestJS standard application from scratch but taking the full control of your dependencies, scripts and source code. Thus, you don't want to use the usual npx @nestjs/cli new command (which basically bootstraps the typescript starter project) since you wish a bare minimum app.

You don't need to use the Nest CLI if you don't want to. You can literally just create a index.ts file, use NestJS within it and run it with ts-node index.ts (though you gotta make sure you have the correct tsconfig.json)

Another option is to clone the starter repo from GitHub. Note that to install the JavaScript flavor of the starter project, we can clone this repo, but you’ll need Babel to compile vanilla JavaScript).

git clone https://github.com/nestjs/typescript-starter.git project cd project yarn yarn add -D prisma npx prisma init

Take a look at Nest.js web server. When the file serving option is turned on, it not only slows down your app because filesystem checks for every request but also using synchronous fs.stat to check if the file exists.

Alternatively, you can serve your frontend from the backend using serve-static. Note that this doesn't actually require that your frontend source code is nested in the backend source code directory. You are just serving the build files, not the source, so only those build files need to end up in the `nest` directory. Our dev script just peaks a level up (IE `../frontend`), while our deploy GitHub action builds the frontend and moves the files into the backend before building `nest`.