Add Cloud Resources to Fastify Apps

In this guide we'll be scaffolding a new Fastify application and including the Nitric framework to allow for the addition of other cloud resources like topics, queues and buckets.

Prerequisites

To complete this guide you'll need the following:

• Node.js installed locally
• Nitric CLI installed
• (optional) Your choice of an AWS, GCP or Azure account

Getting Started

Let's start by setting up a Nitric project and adding Fastify:

nitric new fastify-example js-starter

Then install dependencies and add fastify:

cd fastify-example
yarn install
yarn add fastify

You can go ahead and open this new project in your editor of choice. You should see a project structure similar to:

├── services
│   ├── api.js
├── node_modules
│   ├── ...
├── .gitignore
├── nitric.yaml
├── node.dockerfile
├── node.dockerfile.dockerignore
├── package.json
├── README.md
└── yarn.lock

In this structure you'll notice the services folder. By default, this is where Nitric expects the entrypoint code for your application. However, that's just a convention, we can change that to anything else that suits our needs. Now, let's add some Fastify code to get things started.

import Fastify from 'fastify'
import { http } from '@nitric/sdk'

const fastify = Fastify({
  logger: true,
})

fastify.get('/', (request, reply) => {
  reply.send('Hello World!')
})

async function bootstrap(port: number) {
  const address = await fastify.listen({ port })

  console.log(`Server listening on ${address}`)

  return fastify.server
}

http(bootstrap)

At this point we're ready to start testing locally.

nitric start

Your Fastify application will now be running with Nitric acting as a proxy. We can test this in another terminal or web browser.

curl http://localhost:4001
Hello World!

Enhancing Fastify with Nitric

With everything working so far, now is a good time to see how we can add new resources to the Fastify app using Nitric. In this example, let's add a pub/sub topic which allows us to perform work in the background, but still respond quickly via the HTTP API.

You can update the api.js file like so:

import Fastify from 'fastify'
import { http, topic } from '@nitric/sdk'

const workRequests = topic('work-requests').allow('publish')
const fastify = Fastify({
  logger: true,
})

fastify.get('/', async (request, reply) => {
  await workRequests.publish()
  reply.send('Hello World!')
})

async function bootstrap(port: number) {
  const address = await fastify.listen({ port })

  console.log(`Server listening on ${address}`)

  return fastify.server
}

http(bootstrap)

We'll also add a new function to do the background work:

touch services/worker.js

Add this code to that file:

import { topic } from '@nitric/sdk'

const sleep = (ms) => new Promise((res) => setTimeout(res, ms))

topic('work-requests').subscribe(async (ctx) => {
  console.log('Starting new request')
  // wait for 2 seconds to simulate a long running task
  await sleep(2000)
  console.log('Request processed')
})

Now, when you browse to localhost:4001 you'll notice that the console outputs these lines with a 2 second delay between each line:

Starting new request
Request processed

At this point, we can stop the running application and try to deploy it to a cloud provider.

Deploy to the cloud

This is where the true value of Nitric shines. You don't need to perform any manual cloud deployment activities or add solutions like Terraform to get this project into your cloud environment, Nitric takes care of that for you.

To perform the deployment we'll create a stack, stacks give Nitric the configuration needed for a specific cloud instance of this project, such as the provider and region.

The stack new command below will create a stack named dev that uses the aws provider.

nitric stack new dev aws

Edit the stack file nitric.dev.yaml and set your preferred AWS region, for example us-east-1.

# The nitric provider to use
provider: nitric/aws@latest
# The target AWS region to deploy to
# See available regions:
# https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/lambda-service.html
region: us-east-2

Let's try deploying the stack with the up command:

nitric up

When the deployment is complete, go to the relevant cloud console and you'll be able to see and interact with your application.

To tear down your application from the cloud, use the down command:

nitric down