This guide will walk you through the creation of the application in this repository, and in the process, you will learn some of the basics of Actionhero.
You will become comfortable with the following topics:
A simple Blogging API & site:
Adding a chat room
Next Steps
git clone https://github.com/actionhero/actionhero-tutorial.git
cd actionhero-tutorial
npm install
npm run dev
or npm start
Redis
as a database. You will need to have it installed on your computer.files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
Actionhero is a node.js package. Be sure you have node.js (version >= 10.0.0) installed. Node comes with npm, the node package manager. npm
includes a command npx
we can use to run actionhero simply.
This guide was written on OSX It should be appropriate for any version of OSX > 10.6. It should also work on most Linux distributions (Ubuntu, CentOs, Fedora, etc). The concepts presented here should also be appropriate for windows users, but many of the "Getting Started" commands will not work as described here. If you are looking for help on getting started on Windows, please join the Actionhero Slack Channel to get help.
Create a new directory for this project and enter it (in the terminal):
mkdir ~/actionhero-tutorial
cd ~/actionhero-tutorial
note: From this point forward, it is assumed that all commands listed are run from within the ~/actionhero-tutorial
directory.
Use the Actionhero generator to build your project
npx actionhero generate
Install any project dependencies
npm install
Try to boot the Actionhero server in development mode
npm run dev
You should see the default Actionhero welcome page at http://localhost:8080/public
(visit in your browser)
The port 8080
is defined in src/config/web.ts
, along with all other settings for Actionhero. Actionhero has two types of HTTP routes: static files and api routes. static files are served from /public
and the API is served from /api
. These routes are configurable from files within /src/config
. Actionhero also picks one of these to be the default root route. This is defined by config.web.rootEndpointType
in src/config/web.ts
. We want our default route to serve our index.html
file from /public
, so we can leave this setting as "file".
Since you are running in development mode (npm run dev
), Actionhero will notice you made a change to a config file and reboot the server automatically for you. Now, visit http://localhost:8080/
and you should see the welcome page. You will note that the setting we just changed was under the servers.web
section. This is because this setting is only relevant to HTTP clients, and not the others (websocket, etc). We will talk about these more later.
We should also enable all the servers which ship with Actionhero (websocket). Enable them by setting enabled:true
in their config files.
Actionhero uses the variable NODE_ENV
to determine which modification file to load from /config/*
to load to modify the default values in config
. This is how you can set different variables per environment. We will use this for testing later.
files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
Modules are common libraries you create to help you manipulate data. These are normal Typescript functions/modules/classes. Here, we will build 2 that help us manage users and posts. Typescript will then make all the methods and classes available for us in the rest of our application once we require the module
I'll define some common blog functions we'll use later in actions in initializers/blog.ts
Our blogging methods are:
Const Blog = {
// posts
postAdd: async function(...) {},
postView: async function(...) {},
postsList: async function(...) {},
postEdit: async function(...) {},
postDelete: async function(...) {},
// comments
commentAdd: async function(...) {},
commentsView: async function(...) {},
commentDelete: async function(...) {}
};
Const Users = {
// users
add: async function (...) {},
list: async function (...) {},
authenticate: async function (...) {},
del: async function (...) {},
};
A few things to note:
async/await
.api.redis.clients.client
to talk to redis. To make that simpler, we've made a redis()
method to reference the redis client object for us.files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
Now that we have our helpers for getting and setting blog posts, how can we allow users to use them? Actions!
The files in /src/actions
can define a one or more Actions each, so let's create one for comments and one for posts.
npx actionhero generate-action --name=users
npx actionhero generate-action --name=blog
Action
ClassActions can be extended by extending the Action
class. We want to denote on each of our actions whether or not we require an authenticated user (to make a new post) or they are public (anyone can read the blog) - We'll use action.authenticated = true
to denote that the action requires authentication. However, that property is not a normal property of the class Action
. We can make a new class, AuthenticatedAction
which we can then extend:
// from classes/authenticatedAction
import { Action } from "actionhero";
export abstract class AuthenticatedAction extends Action {
authenticated: boolean;
}
files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
Now that we've defined our Actions, we want to expose them via the HTTP server. Actionhero does this via a src/config/routes.ts
file. Routes allow different HTTP verbs to preform a different action on the same URL. We'll use a config/routes.ts
file to transform our API into restful resources for users, comments, and posts. You can derive input variables from the structure of URLs with routing as well.
curl -X POST -d "userName=evan" -d "password=password" "http://localhost:8080/api/user"
curl -X POST -d "userName=evan" -d "password=password" "http://localhost:8080/api/authenticate"
curl -X POST -d "password=password" -d "title=first-post" -d "content=My%20first%20post.%20%20Yay." http://localhost:8080/api/post/evan
(the user name is derived from the route)curl -X GET "http://localhost:8080/api/post/evan/first-post"
curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/api/posts/evan
curl -X POST -d "comment=cool%20post" -d "commenterName=Someone_Else" "http://localhost:8080/api/comment/evan/first-post"
curl -X GET "http://localhost:8080/api/comments/evan/first-post"
Once you define your routes, you can visit the Swagger page (http://localhost:8080/swagger
) to see the automatic documentation of your HTTP API Actions!
files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
In the steps above, we created a users.authenticate
method, but didn't use it anywhere. We also denoted that we wanted some actions to be authenticated with authenticated: true
, but didn't create any logic to do so... now we will with an Action Middleware
.
First, Let's create a new initializer for this:
npx actionhero generate-initializer --name=middleware
Middleware can run before and after every action (global), or just those actions that opt into them. In our case, we'll make a global middleware which applies to all actions and check if the action being run should be authenticated or not. The preProcessor
lifecycle hook we are using will run before the Action, but will have access to the params sent by the user - like userName
and password
so we can check if they are correct.
Middleware are added to the api by adding them via actions.addMiddleware(authenticationMiddleware)
.
files discussed in this section:
When you generate a new Actionhero project, we will generate tests for you to be run with the Jest framework. Actionhero exposes a number of utilities to make it easy to boot up a server with configuration overrides to make testing easier. We'll also use the request
package to make HTTP requests simpler in our tests. npm install --save-dev request
(which will add the package to your package.json
in the devDependencies
section).
We can now run the test with the jest
command. In our package.json
we already have npm test
configured to run the test suite how we would like it: "test": "jest"
. Jest will automatically set NODE_ENV=test
for us, to tell Actionhero we are running this command in the 'test' environment this will signal Actionhero load any config changes from the /config
file's TEST configurations, if they are different. In our case, we set up redis and the servers a little differently when testing.
A successful test run looks like this:
We also use the npm lifecycle command pretest
to run a linter, prettier
. This helps our code to conform to a consistent style and will check for errors like variable scope or missing variables.
files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
Actionhero is primarily an API server, but it can still serve static files for you. In config/api.ts
, the config.general.paths.public
directive is where your web site's "root" is. You can also use actions to manipulate file content with the api.staticFile.get
method. Actionhero is also a great choice to power your front-end applications (angular, react, ember, etc).
Provided in index.html
is a simple page that demonstrates how to call an action to show some status about your sever, using the status
action (generated with a new project).
files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
/public/chat.html
demonstrates how to use Actionhero's websockets. The websocket
is a first-class protocol in Actionhero and has all the capabilities of web
clients - and more! Web sockets are persistent connections which also enables Actionhero's chat room features. We will make use of them here.
Note how we make use of the event libraries of actionheroWebsocket
and build our events around it. This library is accessed by including /public/javascript/actionHeroClient.min.ts
in your html page.:
client = new ActionheroWebsocketClient();
// register for events
client.on("connected", function () {
console.log("connected!");
});
client.on("disconnected", function () {
console.log("disconnected :(");
});
client.on("error", function (error) {
console.log("error", error.stack);
});
client.on("reconnect", function () {
console.log("reconnect");
});
client.on("reconnecting", function () {
console.log("reconnecting");
});
client.on("welcome", function (message) {
appendMessage(message);
});
client.on("say", function (message) {
appendMessage(message);
});
client.connect(function (error, details) {
if (error) {
console.error(error);
} else {
// run an action
client.action("createChatRoom", { name: "defaultRoom" }, function (data) {
// join a chat room
client.roomAdd("defaultRoom");
});
}
});
files discussed in this section:
relevant documentation section:
Actionhero comes with a robust task system for delayed/recurring tasks. For our example, we are going to create a task which will log some stats to the command line every 30 seconds. You can do much more with Actionhero's task system, including distributed tasks, recurring tasks, and more.
npx actionhero generate-task --name=stats --queue=default --frequency=30000
task.frequency
to run every 30 secondsminTaskProcessors
and maxTaskProcesssors
in /src/config/tasks.ts
(set them both to 1)./config/tasks.ts
.*view
actions