typescript-starter VS vite-plugin-node

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

One of the advantages of using the Vite plugin (vite-plugin-node) is that we can choose to use either esbuild or swc to compile our TypeScript files, though we used only esbuild in this post.

Yes, there is a Vite plugin: vite-plugin-node which leverages Vite's SSR mode to bring HMR to the Node dev server and also provides adapters for Express, Koa, and Fastify.