The TERN stack template

The TERN stack:

• Tigris: Serverless NoSQL Database & Search platform
• Express.js: Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js
• React: The library for web and native user interfaces
• Node.js: an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment

About the TERN stack template

The template has the following structure and make use of NPM workspaces:

.
├── apps
│   ├── client
│   │   ├── public
│   │   └── src
│   └── server
│       ├── scripts
│       └── src
└── packages
    └── shared
        └── src

The repo has the following workspaces:

• @tern-app/client in apps/client: initially created using the react-ts template for vite
• @tern-app/server in apps/server: a TypeScript application using Express.js, the Node.js runtime, and Tigris.
• @tern-app/shared: for code that is used in both the @tern-app/server and @tern-app/client

Prerequisites

To use the TERN stack template you'll either need a Tigris Cloud account or a self-hosted Tigris up and running.

Quickstart

Install dependencies

Install the dependencies for all the workspaces using the following command:

npm i -ws

Create a Tigris project

There's a script in ./package.json called tigris:init that does that for you. It takes a --project argument:

npm run tigris:init --project=tern-app

Use a different value to tern-app for your Tigris project name if you like.

This will then take you through the login flow to authenticate the Tigris CLI with Tigris Cloud (by default). If you haven't already signed up, you can also go through the signup flow.

Once the CLI has been authenticated a file, apps/server/.env.local, will be created containing your Tigris project config.

Run the client

In one terminal run:

npm run dev -w=@tern-app/client

The client will run on localhost:3000 by default.

Run the server

In another terminal run:

npm run dev -w=@tern-app/server

The server will run on localhost:3001 by default.

Start building

Open the code in your favourite editor and start building your TERN app.

Additional scripts

Client (apps/client)

The client is a TypeScript React application. To learn React, check out the React documentation.

For the apps/client workspace, you can run:

npm dev -w=@tern-app/client

Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits.
You will also see any lint errors in the console.

npm run build -w=@tern-app/client

Builds the app for production to the dist folder.

Server (apps/server)

The server is an Express.js TypeScript application. To learn Express.js, check out the Express.js website.

Before you start the server you'll need to create a Tigris project and save the project configuration in a .env.local file. The top-level package.json has a script for that. See the Quickstart section for details.

With the Tigris project config in place you can run the server.

For the apps/server workspace, you can run:

npm run dev -w=@tern-app/server

Runs the app in the development mode, running on http://localhost:3001.

The application will reload if you make edits.

npm run setup -w=@tern-app/server

Registers the Tigris data models with Tigris. For more info, see the Tigris data modeling with TypeScript docs.

npm run start -w=@tern-app/server

Runs the built output from dist.

npm run build -w=@tern-app/server

Builds the app for production to the dist folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

Your app is ready to be deployed!