DEV Community: Cedric Ahenkorah

Automating My Node.js Setup with notsc 🦉

Cedric Ahenkorah — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 10:00:13 +0000

How do we start?...

A year ago, around this time, I published a blog post on how to set up a Node.js project with Typescript support.

Cedric Ahenkorah

Aug 2 '24

Setting up a Node.js Express project with Typescript

#node #softwareengineering #typescript #express

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2 min read

At the time, I just wanted a place to reference the steps I normally go through when scaffolding a new backend project with Nodejs and Typescript. Writing that blog post felt like the best way to keep this knowledge organized and share that it with anyone else who may find it helpful.

I got a few views on that post, and while I never really knew how useful it was to others, one moment stood out: at one dev meetup last year (Code and cocktails), a friend introduced me to someone who had found that post very helpful. It felt really great that something I put out based of my own pain points (googling the right steps, config set up and etc) in setting up a new Nodejs backend project made someone else's life a bit easier.

A year on and I still reference this blog post myself each time I want to scaffold a new backend project. But, honestly, I've grown tired of reading it each time and repeating the same setup tasks - adding logging, setting up a database, configuring redis, defining standard API responses and so on. It's tedious, and I don't have them memorized. So I asked myself, how can I make this easier? Ideally I should be able to "one shot" a new backend project with Node.js with TS support, and with all the tools and config I usually set up manually. After some research, I settled on building a CLI tool that does this for me.

Meet Notsc🦉
A simple CLI tool that scaffolds up my Node.js with Typescript support backend project in a few seconds and includes the boilerplate config I typically need. No more referencing my own blog post loool. It's opinionated, clean and fast. But yeah, that's the beauty of engineering, there's always a new / better way to do something or solve a problem. I'll be using this CLI tool myself anytime I need to set up my backend projects, and you can too. To get started, run this command to install the CLI globally on your machine and watch it do the magic for you.

npmjs.com

npm install -g notsc

Now installed, all you need to do is run it and follow the prompts:

notsc

You should be able to scaffold a new Node.js with Typescript support backend project this way.

This is an open source project and I'd love your contributions, support and feedback.

cedricahenkorah / notsc

nodejs backend boilerplate with typescript support

notsc 🦉

notsc is a highly customizable boilerplate generator for quickly scaffolding Node.js + TypeScript API projects. It supports optional integrations like database setup, Swagger/OpenAPI documentation, Redis, Jest for testing, and Docker—so you can start building with the tools you need, right out of the box.

🚀 Features

✅ TypeScript support
🧱 Modular architecture (controllers, routes, services)
📦 Optional features: database, Swagger, Redis, Jest, Docker
🎯 ESLint + Prettier setup
🔁 Nodemon for development
🧪 Jest for testing (optional)
🌐 Swagger/OpenAPI setup (optional)
🐳 Dockerfile & Dockerignore (optional)
📂 Environment variable management

📦 Installation & Usage

Using the Published Package

Quick Start

npx notsc my-app

Global Installation

npm install -g notsc
notsc my-app

With Package Managers

# Using yarn
yarn create notsc my-app

# Using pnpm
pnpm create notsc my-app

Local Development

Clone and Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone <your-repo-url>
cd notsc
# Install dependencies
npm

…

View on GitHub

Until next time. I should definitely be writing more often, this was fun!🙂

Setting up a Node.js Express project with Typescript

Cedric Ahenkorah — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 09:38:01 +0000

Setting up a Node.js project with TypeScript can significantly improve your developer experience by providing static type checking in your code. In this blog, I'll guide you through the steps to set up a Node.js Express project with TypeScript.

Create your project directory

Create a directory for your project and then navigate to it. In this example the name of our directory is node-ts.

mkdir node-ts
cd node-ts

Initialize the project

Install a new node project with npm init. This will create a package.json file in the root of your project.

npm init

Install TypeScript

Install TypeScript as a development dependancy.

npm install --save-dev typescript

Initialize the TypeScript configuration file

npx tsc --init

Set up your project structure

Create directories for your source (src) and compiled files (dist).

mkdir src
mkdir dist

Install development tools

Install nodemon and ts-node as development dependencies to run and monitor your project.

npm install nodemon ts-node --save-dev

Configure scripts

Configure a script in the package.json to run your server in development mode.

"scripts": {
    "dev": "nodemon --exec ts-node src/server.ts"
  }

Configure nodemon

Create a nodemon.json file to configure nodemon to watch the TypeScript files.

{
  "watch": ["src"],
  "ext": "ts,json",
  "exec": "ts-node ./src/server.ts"
}

Configure TypeScript

In the tsconfig.json, specify the compiler options and include your source files.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es2016",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "rootDir": "./src",
    "outDir": "./dist",
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "strict": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true
  },
  "include": ["src/**/*.ts"]
}

Install Express

npm install express
npm install @types/express --save-dev

Create a simple express server

Create a server.ts file in your src/ directory with the following basic set up for an express server.

import express from 'express';

const app = express();
const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('Hello, TypeScript with Node.js and Express!');
});

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Server is running at http://localhost:${port}`);
});

Start the development server

To start the server run the script you configured in your package.json file.

npm run dev

Your Node.js Express with TypeScript project should be up and running now.