NestJS Tutorial: Build a REST API from Scratch to Production

What you will learn

• Node http by hand: methods, status codes, headers and a URL map
• NestJS controllers, services, modules and dependency injection
• Reading input, validation with DTOs, and problem+json errors
• TypeORM and SQLite: entities, transactions and a UNIQUE seat
• Cursor pagination and idempotency keys for safe retries
• JWT auth with refresh-token rotation, roles and ownership
• Cache-Control, ETags and versioning without breaking clients
• OpenAPI docs, end-to-end tests, and running it in production

How it works

Each topic adds one piece to the same code base, with every command run and its real output shown.

Plain Node first

• NestJS API Tutorial 1: What an API is, and your first server
• NestJS API 2: HTTP: methods, status codes and headers
• NestJS API 3: Designing the URLs: resources and REST

Into NestJS

• Moving to NestJS: controllers, services and modules (NestJS)
• NestJS API 5: Reading input: path, query, body and headers
• NestJS API 6: Validation and error messages clients can use
• NestJS API Tutorial 7: Storing data: a real database

Features real clients need

• NestJS API Tutorial 8: Pagination, filtering and sorting
• NestJS API Tutorial 9: Safe retries with idempotency keys
• NestJS API Tutorial 10: Authentication and authorization
• NestJS API Tutorial 11: Caching and ETags
• NestJS API 12: Versioning and changing the API safely

Document, test and ship

• NestJS API Tutorial 13: Documenting it with OpenAPI
• NestJS API Tutorial 14: Testing
• NestJS API Tutorial 15: Running it in production

More courses

• Jobs, linked to lessons — Browse jobs where every requirement links to the chapter that teaches it. See how ready you are, how long the gap takes to close, and which listings look stale.
• Match a job post to courses — Paste a job post. Each skill is matched to a track here and put in learning order, foundations first.
• React from open source with patterns — Patterns extracted from Material UI, Radix, React Aria, React Hook Form, Redux Toolkit, TanStack, and Next.js — not slides about hooks.
• Database in depth — How a query becomes work. Indexes, isolation, locks, and the plans that explain why a page is slow — not an ORM tour.
• System Design — Core concepts first (SQL vs NoSQL, CAP, indexing, replication, sharding), then designs grouped by what carries them: the database, Redis, Kafka, or many services.
• Microservices — Microservice patterns one diagram at a time: how to split a monolith, how services talk, and how data stays consistent without distributed transactions.
• Kafka — A beginner-to-senior path through event logs, reliable delivery, production operations, and disaster recovery.
• AI engineering for software engineers — Eight free reads, in order, for software engineers moving into AI: when to build an agent, how to build one, how to test it, and how the model works underneath.
• Frontend system design — How a UI is sliced when it is a product, not a page: ownership of state, cache, routes, and what happens when the network lies.
• TypeScript in depth — The type system as a design tool. Inference, narrowing, generics, and the errors that mean the model is wrong — not a catalog of utility types.
• CSS in depth — See the box, then the page. Visual chapters from the box model through Flexbox surprises, Grid, selectors, and units, then backgrounds, shapes, and visual effects, each with a playground.
• Accessibility — Foundations first (WCAG in plain words, semantic HTML, lists, alt text), then hands-on HTML labs, a full pass of WAI-ARIA 1.3, and a final fix-the-page challenge.
• Docker — What an image is, why layers cache, and how containers find each other on a network.
• Redis — Fifteen Redis patterns, one picture each: cache, session, lock, counter, rate limiter, queue, and when Redis is the wrong tool.
• Kubernetes — Kubernetes from zero to operators: why it exists, Pods, Deployments and Services, then configuration, networking, storage, scheduling, scaling and security.