NestJS on AWS with SST

We are going to build an app with NestJS, add an S3 Bucket for file uploads, and deploy it to AWS in a container with SST.

View source

You can view the source of this example in our repo.

Before you get started, make sure to configure your AWS credentials.

Note

You need Node 22.12 or higher for this example to work.

Also make sure you have Node 22.12. Or set the --experimental-require-module flag. This’ll allow NestJS to import the SST SDK.

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Examples

We also have a few other NestJS examples that you can refer to.

• Build a hit counter with NestJS and Redis

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1. Create a project

Let’s start by creating our Nest app.

nest new aws-nestjs-container
cd aws-nestjs-container

We are picking npm as the package manager.

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Init SST

Now let’s initialize SST in our app.

npx sst@latest init
npm install

This’ll create a sst.config.ts file in your project root.

To make sure the types in the sst.config.ts are picked up, add the following to the tsconfig.json.

tsconfig.json

{
 "include": ["src/**/*", "test/**/*", "sst-env.d.ts"]
}

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2. Add a Service

To deploy our Nest app, let’s add an AWS Fargate container with Amazon ECS. Update your sst.config.ts.

sst.config.ts

async run() {
  const vpc = new sst.aws.Vpc("MyVpc");
  const cluster = new sst.aws.Cluster("MyCluster", { vpc });

  cluster.addService("MyService", {
    loadBalancer: {
      ports: [{ listen: "80/http", forward: "3000/http" }],
    },
    dev: {
      command: "npm run start:dev",
    },
  });
}

This creates a VPC with an ECS Cluster, and adds a Fargate service to it.

Note

By default, your service in not deployed when running in dev.

The dev.command tells SST to instead run our Nest app locally in dev mode.

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Start dev mode

Run the following to start dev mode. This’ll start SST and your Nest app.

npx sst dev

Once complete, click on MyService in the sidebar and open your Nest app in your browser.

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3. Add an S3 Bucket

Let’s add an S3 Bucket for file uploads. Add this to your sst.config.ts below the Vpc component.

sst.config.ts

const bucket = new sst.aws.Bucket("MyBucket");

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Link the bucket

Now, link the bucket to the container.

sst.config.ts

cluster.addService("MyService", {
  // ...
  link: [bucket],
});

This will allow us to reference the bucket in our Nest app.

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4. Upload a file

We want a POST request made to the / route to upload a file to our S3 bucket. Let’s add this below our getHello method in our src/app.controller.ts.

src/app.controller.ts

@Post()
@UseInterceptors(FileInterceptor('file'))
async uploadFile(@UploadedFile() file: Express.Multer.File): Promise<string> {
  const params = {
    Bucket: Resource.MyBucket.name,
    ContentType: file.mimetype,
    Key: file.originalname,
    Body: file.buffer,
  };

  const upload = new Upload({
    params,
    client: s3,
  });

  await upload.done();

  return 'File uploaded successfully.';
}

Tip

We are directly accessing our S3 bucket with Resource.MyBucket.name.

Add the imports. We’ll use the extra ones below.

src/app.controller.ts

import {
  S3Client,
  GetObjectCommand,
  ListObjectsV2Command,
} from '@aws-sdk/client-s3';
import { Resource } from 'sst';
import { Express } from 'express';
import { Upload } from '@aws-sdk/lib-storage';
import { FileInterceptor } from '@nestjs/platform-express';
import { getSignedUrl } from '@aws-sdk/s3-request-presigner';
import { Post, Redirect, UploadedFile, UseInterceptors } from '@nestjs/common';

const s3 = new S3Client({});

And install the npm packages.

npm install -D @types/multer
npm install @aws-sdk/client-s3 @aws-sdk/lib-storage @aws-sdk/s3-request-presigner

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5. Download the file

We’ll add a /latest route that’ll download the latest file in our S3 bucket. Let’s add this below our uploadFile method in src/app.controller.ts.

src/app.controller.ts

@Get('latest')
@Redirect('/', 302)
async getLatestFile() {
  const objects = await s3.send(
    new ListObjectsV2Command({
      Bucket: Resource.MyBucket.name,
    }),
  );

  const latestFile = objects.Contents.sort(
    (a, b) => b.LastModified.getTime() - a.LastModified.getTime(),
  )[0];

  const command = new GetObjectCommand({
    Key: latestFile.Key,
    Bucket: Resource.MyBucket.name,
  });
  const url = await getSignedUrl(s3, command);

  return { url };
}

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Test your app

To upload a file run the following from your project root.

curl -F file=@package.json http://localhost:3000/

This should upload the package.json. Now head over to http://localhost:3000/latest in your browser and it’ll download you what you just uploaded.

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5. Deploy your app

To deploy our app we’ll first add a Dockerfile.

Dockerfile

FROM node:22

WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm install
COPY . .
RUN npm run build

EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node", "dist/main"]

This just builds our Nest app in a Docker image.

Tip

You need to be running Docker Desktop to deploy your app.

Let’s also add a .dockerignore file in the root.

.dockerignore

dist
node_modules

Now to build our Docker image and deploy we run:

npx sst deploy --stage production

You can use any stage name here but it’s good to create a new stage for production. This’ll give the URL of your Nest app deployed as a Fargate service.

✓  Complete
   MyService: http://jayair-MyServiceLoadBala-592628062.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com

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Connect the console

As a next step, you can setup the SST Console to git push to deploy your app and monitor it for any issues.

You can create a free account and connect it to your AWS account.