Standalone applications

There are several ways of mounting a Nest application. You can create a web app, a microservice or just a bare Nest standalone application (without any network listeners). The Nest standalone application is a wrapper around the Nest IoC container, which holds all instantiated classes. We can obtain a reference to any existing instance from within any imported module directly using the standalone application object. Thus, you can take advantage of the Nest framework anywhere, including, for example, scripted CRON jobs. You can even build a CLI on top of it.

Getting started

To create a Nest standalone application, use the following construction:

@@filename()
async function bootstrap() {
  const app = await NestFactory.createApplicationContext(AppModule);
  // your application logic here ...
}
bootstrap();

Retrieving providers from static modules

The standalone application object allows you to obtain a reference to any instance registered within the Nest application. Let's imagine that we have a TasksService provider in the TasksModule module that was imported by our AppModule module. This class provides a set of methods that we want to call from within a CRON job.

@@filename()
const tasksService = app.get(TasksService);

To access the TasksService instance we use the get() method. The get() method acts like a query that searches for an instance in each registered module. You can pass any provider's token to it. Alternatively, for strict context checking, pass an options object with the strict: true property. With this option in effect, you have to navigate through specific modules to obtain a particular instance from the selected context.

@@filename()
const tasksService = app.select(TasksModule).get(TasksService, { strict: true });

Following is a summary of the methods available for retrieving instance references from the standalone application object.

get()	Retrieves an instance of a controller or provider (including guards, filters, and so on) available in the application context.
select()	Navigates through the module's graph to pull out a specific instance of the selected module (used together with strict mode as described above).

info Hint In non-strict mode, the root module is selected by default. To select any other module, you need to navigate the modules graph manually, step by step.

Retrieving providers from dynamic modules

When dealing with dynamic modules, we should supply the same object that represents the registered dynamic module in the application to app.select. For example:

@@filename()
export const dynamicConfigModule = ConfigModule.register({ folder: './config' });

@Module({
  imports: [dynamicConfigModule],
})
export class AppModule {}

Then you can select that module later on:

@@filename()
const configService = app.select(dynamicConfigModule).get(ConfigService, { strict: true });

Terminating phase

If you want the Node application to close after the script finishes (e.g., for a script running CRON jobs), you must call the app.close() method in the end of your bootstrap function like this:

@@filename()
async function bootstrap() {
  const app = await NestFactory.createApplicationContext(AppModule);
  // application logic...
  await app.close();
}
bootstrap();

And as mentioned in the Lifecycle events chapter, that will trigger lifecycle hooks.

Example

A working example is available here.