Getting Started

This set of articles covers the core fundamentals of Pikku. To understand how Pikku operates, we'll go over the express-middleware setup.

Prerequisites

Ensure that Node.js (version >= 18) is installed on the operating system.

Setup

Begin by installing the starter project using npm create:

npm

npm create pikku@latest

Yarn

npm create pikku@latest
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pnpm

npm create pikku@latest
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Bun

bunx create-pikku@latest

Which will then guide you through starting a project:

Core Files

Here's a brief overview of there core files:

File	Description
start.ts	uWebsocketServer / entry point
services.ts	Contains all the Pikku services management
channels.ts	Websockets
http.ts	HTTP Endpoints
scheduled-tasks.ts	Cron Jobs
types/application-types.d.ts	Application types

The config file

The pikku.config.json file is used to drive the pikku CLI tool.

info

The pikku CLI tool is used to:

• Index all your API routes.
• Generate the route schemas.
• Create typescript declaration files to aid developers.

For more info you can checkout the CLI documentation.

pikku.config.json

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See full example on GitHub

Generated Files

The two files we use within our code are pikku-bootstrap.gen.ts and pikku-types.gen.d.ts. The rest are generated in order to create types to improve your developer experience, as well as documentation and schemas to validate input against.

The generated files, not needed for quick start.

File	Description
pikku-schemas/	The directory that contains all the schemas we'll validate calls against
pikku-schemas/register.ts	Imports all the schemas and adds them to pikku
pikku-bootstrap.ts	Imports the required files into our runtime
pikku-routes.ts	Imports all the files with routes in them
pikku-types.d.ts	Provides types to be used in the application