fix: none of the scripts ran; upgrade Nest 7 → 12 and TypeORM 0.2 → 0.3

[ludejun]

The headline

Nothing in this repo could be built, started or tested. Every npm script begins with cross-env, which was never in devDependencies:

$ pnpm build
sh: cross-env: command not found

Four dependencies used but never declared

cross-env, lodash (15 call sites), body-parser and jsonwebtoken. All four resolved through hoisting under npm/yarn and fail under pnpm's stricter layout.

• lodash is now declared.
• body-parser is replaced by Express's own json() / urlencoded() — built in since Express 4.16.
• The jsonwebtoken import only supplied a type; it is gone.

Framework upgrades

Nest 7 → 12	HttpModule / HttpService moved from @nestjs/common to @nestjs/axios in Nest 8.
TypeORM 0.2 → 0.3	createConnection → DataSource, ConnectionOptions → DataSourceOptions, and findOne() now requires explicit where options.
@nestjs/cli pinned to 11	The 12 line pulls an ESM-only ora through @angular-devkit/schematics, which crashes on Node 22 with ERR_REQUIRE_CYCLE_MODULE.

Plus pg 8.23, helmet 4 → 8, express-rate-limit 5 → 8, class-validator 0.13 → 0.15, nodemailer 6 → 10, TypeScript 4.2 → 5.9.

Note

TypeORM 1.x is out and @nestjs/typeorm 12 accepts it, but 0.3 is what nearly all Nest documentation targets. Worth revisiting separately.

Bugs this surfaced

• CatsService swallowed errors and returned them as data. Both methods ended in catch (err) { return err; }, so a failed query reached the client as a 200 with an Error object in the body instead of going through the error filter. Errors now propagate, with a regression test.
• CatEntity was missing the columns the API accepts. The endpoint takes age and breed; the entity declared only id and name, so TypeORM silently dropped both on write.
• The e2e spec used import * as request from 'supertest', which is not callable with esModuleInterop on.

Jest → Vitest

@nestjs/testing 12 is ESM-only, and Jest 30 cannot require() ESM before Node 24.9 — every suite failed to load. Vitest runs them through SWC, which implements emitDecoratorMetadata (esbuild does not), so Nest's DI resolves.

The two Cats specs were Nest CLI stubs that could not resolve their own dependencies — they had never run. Replaced with 9 tests mocking the repository via getRepositoryToken, covering both the service and the controller.

Also

• ESLint 9 flat config with typescript-eslint, replacing ESLint 7. 0 errors.
• Type-checking moved to its own tsconfig.typecheck.json: the CommonJS build's node resolution cannot read Vitest's type exports, so the two need different resolvers.
• README split into Chinese README.md and English README_EN.md, both with badges and the full architecture notes. New CHANGELOG.md and bilingual CONTRIBUTING.md.
• New ci.yml (lint, typecheck, test, build on Node 20 and 22) — unit tests only, since the e2e suite needs a live database.
• Migrated to pnpm.

Verified

pnpm lint (0 errors), pnpm typecheck (0 errors), pnpm test (9 passing) and pnpm build all pass.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code