Note: This is kind of a reminder to myself and a way for me to have this knowledge put somewhere else.

Top 5 NestJS Useful Commands

Scaffold a NestJS project

This will create a new project directory, and populate the directory with the initial core Nest files and supporting modules, creating a conventional base structure for your project.

nest new project-name

Generate a module

nest generate module module-name

Generate a service

nest generate service service-name

Generate a controller

nest generate controller controller-name

Generate a new CRUD resource

This will generate all the files above (module, service, and controller) in one go. You can also get the boilerplate code for CRUD operations, DTOs, and entity files.

Note: You can select between REST API, GraphQL, Microservice (non-HTTP), and WebSockets for the transport layer when you use the generate resource command through the CLI.

nest generate resource resource-name

Alias

You can also use the g alias for generate, such as:

nest g controller controller-name

Other useful commands

There’s pretty much a command for everything in NestJS: class, decorator, filter, guard, pipe, and so on.

Generate a class

nest generate class class-name

Generate a decorator

nest generate decorator decorator-name

Generate a filter

nest generate filter filter-name

Generate a guard

nest generate guard guard-name

Generate an interceptor

nest generate interceptor interceptor-name

Generate an interface

nest generate interface interface-name

Generate a library

This command will generate a libs folder (if it doesn’t already exist) and inside the library-name you gave (e.g. date-format), it’ll generate a src folder with the code in it.

nest generate library library-name

This is how it’ll look:

Besides that, this command will also add your lib on the nest-cli.json (which is a topic for another post), on the package.json file, and the jest-e2e.json file. Go check those out! :)

Generate a middleware

nest generate middleware middleware-name

Generate a pipe

nest generate pipe pipe-name

Generate a provider

nest generate provider provider-name

You could also generate a provider inside an existing module:

nest generate provider posts/clients/http-client --flat

This is how it’ll look:

Generate a sub-app

This is useful to generate a new application within a monorepo:

nest generate sub-app mysubapp

This command will add a new application to your project and it’ll completely change the folder structure. So you now have two applications inside the new apps folder and your initial application is still there, but you also have the new application you’ve just generated with this command.

Even if those apps are in separate folders, they can still share common code through libraries (which we’ve covered in this post).

Skip the test file

If you don’t want the CLI to generate the test file for a given command, just use the --no-spec flag option, such as:

nest generate service service-name --no-spec

Generate within an already existing folder

All of the generate commands will create the files in the root folder, so If don’t you want that, you can pass the relative path alongside the name:

nest generate decorator decorators/alphanumeric-transformer

Note: this will create a folder decorators (if it doesn’t exist yet) and a folder alphanumeric-transformer. Therefore, if you don’t want that extra folder, you can use the --flat flag option:

nest generate decorator decorators/alphanumeric-transformer --flat

You can also combine multiple flag options on the same command:

nest generate filter filters/filtertwo --flat --no-spec