A Node.js Toolkit for DevOps Scripting

Some packages to use when writing code to support the real code.

Whether you need to build lambda code or hydrate a test database, most projects that you work on will involve some piece of DevOps scripting. If your application is using Node, there’s no reason not to use it in your scripting too. This makes it easier for other Node developers working on the project to maintain the scripts that support it. With just a few packages you can make a great script that other developers will appreciate.

Running with Types

The first step of any scripting setup is getting your code to run. I could just write pure JavaScript and use Node to execute it directly, but I like the safety that I get with TypeScript. Also, since all of my application code is written in TypeScript, there are a lot of times that I will need to import a controller that I wrote for the application in my script.

As I described in my previous article Running TypeScript without Compiling, ts-node was my go-to solution for this for a long time. I’ve since started using esbuild to transpile all of my TypeScript and have discovered TypeScript Execute, which is similar to ts-node except that it uses esbuild under the hood.