backend-dev-guidelines

Structure Express TypeScript microservices by delegating responsibilities across routes, controllers, services, and repositories. This layered architecture enforces separation of concerns, ensuring controllers handle HTTP requests while services manage business logic and repositories interact with the database.

The repository pattern in Prisma abstracts database access behind repository classes instead of calling Prisma directly in services. Use it to centralize data access logic, making your Express microservices more testable and easier to maintain when scaling database operations.

Validate API request inputs in Express using Zod by defining schemas and applying validation middleware before controllers. This approach ensures incoming data conforms to expected types, catching invalid requests early and preventing bad data from reaching your service layer.

This backend architecture pattern requires Sentry instrumentation for production-grade reliability. Capturing errors to Sentry is a mandatory cross-cutting rule within this workflow, ensuring that runtime exceptions and performance issues in your Express microservices are actively monitored.

You should avoid direct process.env usage in TypeScript Express services by utilizing a unifiedConfig-based configuration approach. Centralizing configuration management prevents scattered environment variable access and simplifies deployment across different microservice environments.