quick-start

Quick start — new project, SQLite + Nest + TypeORM only

The fastest working slice: one entity, one controller, zero DTOs, an on-disk SQLite file. No Postgres, no GraphQL, no bulk — add those later from the other skills (kavo-decorator, global-config, dto-slots, graphql-binding) once this runs. Swagger docs are one optional step, covered at the end (§9).

This page is the TypeORM path. Steps 1–3 and 5–9 are the same whatever ORM you use, but the entity in §4 and the wiring in §6 are TypeORM-specific and do not carry over. On another ORM, read its skill for those two steps:

ORM	Skill	The part that differs
Prisma	prisma-adapter	Needs a marker class per model — no runtime class
Mongoose	mongoose-adapter	The model is the entity; ids are hex strings
MikroORM	mikroorm-adapter	Pass the MikroORM instance, not an EntityManager

1. Create the project

mkdir my-kavo-app && cd my-kavo-app
npm init -y

Set "type": "module" in package.json — every @kavo/* package ships as ESM only:

{
  "name": "my-kavo-app",
  "type": "module",
  "scripts": {
    "build": "tsc -b",
    "start": "node dist/main.js"
  }
}

2. Install packages

Runtime dependencies — Nest, TypeORM, the SQLite driver, and the three @kavo/* packages:

npm install @nestjs/common @nestjs/core @nestjs/platform-express \
  reflect-metadata rxjs typeorm better-sqlite3 \
  @kavo/core @kavo/nest @kavo/typeorm

Dev dependencies — TypeScript and Node types only (no test runner needed for this quick start):

npm install -D typescript @types/node

That's the whole install — no @nestjs/swagger (optional peer, skip it until you want generated API docs) and no graphql (optional peer, only needed for the graphql-binding skill).

3. tsconfig.json

Decorator metadata (emitDecoratorMetadata) is load-bearing — both TypeORM's entity columns and Nest's DI need it: