README.md

NodeServer for ASP.NET Core

An extension of NodeServices to execute side by side versions of node packages.

Installation

Install-Package NeuroSpeech.NodePackageService

Install and setup ProGet from https://inedo.com/proget and publish your private packages onto npm registry inside ProGet. Support for authenticated npm registry will come in future.

Features

1. Side by side execution of different version of same package
2. Download and extract npm packages along with dependencies from private NPM repository such as ProGet
3. TempFolder can be configured on D: drive, recommended for Azure VMs.

Security

1. NodePackageService does not execute npm install or npm start script.
2. TempFolder drive needs write access
3. Only packages listed in PrivatePackages will be downloaded and extracted, however dependencies will not be restricted to package whitelist. Your developers must be careful for not include them in package dependencies.

Setup

services.AddSingleton<NodePackageService>(
    sp => new NodePackageService(sp,
        new NodePackageServiceOptions
        {
            // This must be unique to avoid multiple process accessing same
            // folder conflicts
            TempFolder = "D:\\temp\\" + Guid.NewGuid(),
            // ProGet private registry url
            NPMRegistry = "https://private-proget.company.com/npm/PRIVATE",
            PrivatePackages = new string[] {
                "@company/package@1.0.1",
                "@company/core@1.0.1"
            }
        }));

Execution

    [HttpGet("template/{version}/{name}")]
    public async Task<string> ProcessTemplate(
        [FromRoute] string name,
        [FromRoute] string version,
        [FromBody] EmailModel model,
        [FromService] NodePackageService packageService
    ) {

        // get node services from the installed package version
        // if version does not exist, it will download package
        // along with all its dependencies
        var package = await 
            packageService.GetInstalledPackageASync($"@company/template@{version}");

        return await package.NodeServices.InvokeExportAsync(
            "index.js",
            "default",
            new {
                fromName: "Sender",
                fromAddress: "senderEmail",
                body: model
            });

    }

GetInstalledPackageAsync method will create a folder {TempFolder}\npm\{package}\v{version} and it will extract package from given npm registry.

It will not install npm package, as IIS Website may not have sufficient rights to execute npm command. So in order to make things simpler, NodeServer inspects package.json file and downloads all dependencies in node_modules folder. It does not execute any scripts.

Bundled Dependencies

The best way to publish package would be to bundle all dependencies, so this Library will ignore package with bundled dependencies assuming package contains all necessary dependencies.