⚠️ Rex is deprecated and won't be maintained in the future. I made Kuchiyose as a replacement. Check it out :)

Rex CLI

What is Rex?

Rex is a CLI that will help you scaffold your next Express project, using either TypeScript or JavaScript. But Rex can be much more.

The structure of the templates are one that I follow for all my projects. Sticking to that structure improved my productivity and the readability/maintanability of my projects. That's why I decided to make a CLI that will help me bootstrap such projects as quickly as possible. If you intend to follow the same structure as me, then Rex becomes kind of a Framework, since it will now have a little control on how you write your code.

That's why I decided to call it a Pseudo Framework

Usage

Installation

⚠️Rex is available only on windows for now.

To install Rex on your system, head over to this link and download the RexCLI.exe Download the latest version : the 0.2.3 one

Once the installation is complete, you will need to add Rex's folder to your path. Check in the Program Files folder, you will find a Rex folder, copy it's path and add it to your Path environment variable.

You should now be ready to use Rex. The usage is quite simple.

The init action

To create a new project with rex, you will use the init command

The syntax is rex init {template} {project_name}. Some examples below

rex init js crudAPI
rex init ts hello_rex

Folder Structure

A rex scaffolded project structure looks like this

Each folder contain a readme file that gives you information about what the folder should contain.

• The rex.conf file contains informations that rex reads while doing some operations. Do not edit that file unless you understand what it is doing and know what you are doing.
• The config folder must contain a single index file, from where you will export things such as your database url, your app environment...
• The middlewares folder contains every middleware that is not a main one. For example, if you would have a middleware that would check if the a request comes from a authenticated user by verifying a jwt, you would write it here and export it.
• The routes folder contains folders that stand for routes. These folders contain index files where you export a Express.Router. The name of the folder must match the name of the service which must be dealing with a specific ressource or task.
• The services folder contains files, where you export services. A service is a middleware that performs a specified task. For example the AuthService.ts is where you would write everything that relates to authentication in your app like signing in, registering, changing passwords... Each service is defined as a function and exported
• The utils folder contains utility functions. For example a function to hash passwords, compare a user provided password against a hash stored in the database...every piece of code that is reused but doesn't have a direct relation to the ressource or application business logic

Adding a new service with Rex

You can quickly create a new service with rex, by running

rex add service <service_name>

at the root of your rex generated project. This will create a file in the services directory, a folder in the routes directory and an index file in that folder.

Roadmap

Here are a few things I will work on for Rex.

• Extend Rex to other technologies by adding more templates
• Let users create their own templates

That's it. Drop a star if you like this project or find it useful. Feel free to contribute. If you have any remarks, please reach to me through my socials down below