I Never Want to Create APIs Any Other Way

In this video we'll discuss how we can create typesafe REST APIs using ts-rest. This solution works for NestJS, NextJS, ExpressJS, and even Fastify APIs. With this solution we're able to consume the API on the client with a fully type-safe RPC-like client, leading to the best possible developer experience. This is a specially useful pattern if you happen to be developing your backend and frontend in monorepo. Must watch!

[jonnyfapson]

Thanks for this video.
We build a pretty complicated application with multiple apis + projects and used trpc for it, but we kept on running into very hard to debug issues. This looks a lot better, since it still uses rest under the hood, so it's also trivial to debug. One disadvantage we faced with trpc was the difficulty in getting simple things, like web-hooks to work, since they use a very weird url pattern.

[JohnMcclaned]

The day has finally come omg. So much better than trpc. Thanks for finally making a video on ts-rest :) I'd love to see a ts-rest with react query and fastify video!

[sumitgupta]

I'd love to see a ts-rest with react query and express video. Thanks for making this.

[chris.dillon]

The reason why this is such a great pattern is because where the source of truth is. Docs are fine, docs are good but like tech books (exactly why tech books), they go out of date because they bit-rot. If you instead have this setup executing constantly, generated automatically, semver'd etc ... you'd have a method to maintain your API while creating clients. Pact is another way to do it, given different goals. But it works for the same reason.

The best part of swagger is codegen to me but many people stop at doc gen. Trpc has similar ideas but then you'd have to gen a REST API and then wire that up to swagger and then gen a client. If I have a mobile app or a need for automation/interop, I think I would go with ts-rest first. Now the question is, does it work with Remix?! 🙃 Probably not or not yet.

Honestly, this was the promise of express. "One language" but it didn't materialize (to me) because express was a microframework and TS (when express came out) didn't exist (iirc). Now, yeah, you have end-to-end type safety but you also have one language and types end-to-end which is new. The only limit is Javascript and what Typescript can't solve but I think even that can evolve with browsers. I don't know what the old alternative would be, plugins like Applets I guess but that idea didn't work out.

[michaelangelovideos]

Hey it’s Michael Angelo from the core team at ts-rest, great job!!

[matthewbeardsley]

That's awesome thanks Marius. I was just starting to do the same, I guess manually, well building an SDK client side to interact with Nest that had schemas shared between the two, but this is great. Also the contract file made me think of I can do a similar thing for Firestore collection references shared between admin and client sdk. Yes, to more on this! NextJs or React would be great, with SWR or something similar as well

[TheDeprecatedLibrarian]

Pls make more videos about this library. Its so good & your explanations are smooth & very clean.

[isaacfink]

This is exactly what i needed for my current project, i missed trpc but i also like nest js

[randomandrandomfacts]

I am a new subscriber of your channel. I'm enjoying your Nest JS and Drizzle ORM videos. I have a request. Can you please make a video Implementing Drizzle ORM in Nest JS?

[geebrox]

Awesome! Thank you for such a fantastic tutorial. I was thinking about implementing nest<->trpc<->next in monorepo, and now I believe achieving it using ts rest will be easier. But the only drawback I see now in comparison with trpc is that in ts rest contract, you describe the route, what happens if you don't implement (e.g., forget) it on the server side (nest.js) and try to use it in front (next.js)? In trpc, this scenario cannot happen.

[dawid_dahl]

When should one use GraphQL vs when should one use gRPC vs when should one use this?

Great video, thank you!

[madonps]

Have you come across the nestia library?

[frbloke]

This is a very cool way to create APIs. But I still prefer the "pure contract-first" where you basically define yourself an OpenAPI Spec/Swagger upstream (OpenAPI/JsonSchemas are easier to write as zod schemas imo, and it has the same features!).

This way, you have only one source of truth, you design your API before coding it. Which is very similar to ts-rest's approach, except, all your API consumers can use your API with type-safety no matter the language they're using.

[waltervanwoudenberg]

Monorepo with nextjs + nestjs using drizzle and next-auth with the drizzle adapter would be a cool video to watch. Where both next and nest use/share this drizzle db. That should be E2E typesafe as well

[kaioneal]

I would love this video with react, react native with expo, and nest js. I am curious to how UseGaurd will work on the endpoints in nest js with ts-rest.

[hateem]

Thanks for your consistency, Marius. I have an off-topic question, I could've sworn there was a microservices nestjs tutorial on this channel but i can't seem to find it, or maybe I'm tripping? 😅

[jasonrooney]

How is the performance in a large code base? I keep hearing that Zod can be painfully slow compared to alternatives like Typebox. I’m about to stand up a type safe backend and I’m leaning towards just sharing interfaces from a shared library to avoid ts language server overload.

[fabiojansen]

Can you please tell whts color theme u are using? Nice video

[ceetatsumi]

Love your content ! Thanks for the sharing =D

[VEINbeats]

just use graphql that is part of the structure