#uku

uku is a hapijs boilerplate generator for slinging together APIs/microservices/what-have-yous. It's not another simple lightweight framework that scales and makes empty promises -- it's just a great practice for working with http in node.js.

As mentioned, it's based on hapijs -- an opensource framework that is maintained by WalmartLabs and used internally to power their node.js efforst (including http://m.walmart.com).

This project kicked off with the intent of simply being a boilerplate nodejs server that could be forked-and-customized for each project. These are the primary goals of the project:

• the ability for uku-derived projects to reap the benefits of improvements to the uku-base project/ecosystem while avoiding merge conflicts
• enable other teams to implement/test/deploy their project(s) independently of any other teams while leaving it trivial to absorb their work into a primary project (e.g. longboard which is used to provide dashboard-supporting server-side endpoints).
• highly extensible and reusable but without being excessively-opinionated on what you build and deploy
• avoid merge-conflicts inherent when working on large projects spanning multiple teams

It turned out most of our needs are met by the hapijs-ecosystem itself. I initially started building a module that would load plugins and export one server -- only to discover that glue does precisely that. So that's index.js :).

Glue exports a single function compose accepting a JSON manifest file specifying the Hapi server options, connections and plugins. Glue primarily works in synergy with Rejoice, but can be integrated directly into any Hapi application loader.

When you create an uku project, you'll find that it requires the uku module and feeds it a manifest file:

/* some content omitted for brevity */

const manifest = {
  server: {
    load: config.get('/server/load'),
    debug: {
      request: ['error']
    }
  },

  connections: [{
    port: config.get('/server/port')
  }],

  plugins: plugins
};

/* some content omitted for brevity */

exports.run = function run () {

  return Uku.run(manifest, options);
};

npm install -g heroku/uku

$ uku help
Commands:
  project  Create a new uku project
  plugin   Generate a plugin

Options:
  --help  Show help                                                    [boolean]

peace, love, recycle

$ uku project my-project
my-project intialized at /Users/johnny/Desktop/my-project
Installing dependencies...

# npm output omitted for brevity

Dependency installation completed.

The generated project will resemble what you find here.

• newrelic support via uku
• rollbar support via icecreambar
• forever for ensuring that a given script runs continuously
• lab unit testing
  • originally a fork of mocha; very similar syntax
  • 100% code coverage out of the box
  • a few examples to get you started
• eslint with a configured .eslintrc
• recommended plugins such as
  • icecreambar (rollbar -- as mentioned above)
  • hapi-requre-https to ensure we only handle https requests in production
• a convenient way to require additional plugins in ./plugins.js, including the ability to declare production-only plugins (e.g. https enforcement)
• confidence and an accompying config.js which provides a great way to reference ENV-dependent values without polluting your code conditionals.
• a valid package.json

$ uku plugin my-plugin
my-plugin intialized at /Users/johnny/Desktop/my-plugin
Installing dependencies...

# npm output omitted for brevity

Dependency installation completed.

• a vanilla hapi plugin
• lab unit testing
  • originally a fork of mocha; very similar syntax
  • 100% code coverage out of the box
  • a few examples to get you started
• eslint with a configured .eslintrc
• a valid package.json