Getting started

Everything needed to bootstrap a first gateway with Nodegate is explained here.

Installation

Assuming you have already installed Node.js, create a directory and init your application:

$ mkdir mygateway
$ cd mygateway

Use the npm init command to create a package.json file for your application:

$ npm init

This command promps you for a number of things. Simply hit RETURN to accept the defaults for most of them. Leave index.js as the entry point of your application.

$ entry point: (index.js)

Now install Nodegate and save it in the dependencies list.

$ npm install nodegate --save

The main concept

The concept of Nodegate is simple: you create a gateway with routes defined executing workflows composed of workers. Here is an exemple of a gateway responding, with only one request, user and gist data from the GitHub API:

const nodegate = require('nodegate');
const { aggregate } = require('nodegate/workers');
const gateway = nodegate();

gateway.route({
  method: 'get',
  path: '/:user',
  workflow: [
    aggregate('get', '/users/{params.user}'),
    aggregate('get', '/users/{params.user}/gists', { target: 'gists' }),
  ],
});

gateway.listen(8080);

How does it work?

When a request is handled by Nodegate, a container is created, this container is automatically filled with different kind of data like the body of the request. At the end of the workflow, this container body will be sent as the response.

This means a route without workflow will simply respond with the body of the request.

To fulfill the role of microservice orchestrator, Nodegate is shipped with dozens of workers you can configure into workflows to execute all the needed operations before responding. The workflows executes the configured workers synchronously.