Nodal 0.12 Has Landed — Node.js APIs, Now With Hosted PostgreSQL and More!

Nodal with Hosted PostgreSQL, available via Polybit

It’s been a busy few months. Progress on Nodal is accelerating significantly, and we’re very thankful for our supportive community. Nodal 0.12 represents the beginning of a pretty big leap forward, and I’m excited to share it with you.

For those who don’t know, Polybit is now the managing body of Nodal with some pretty lofty goals of aligning open source and infrastructure for developers, teams and companies. We’ll have more material in the coming weeks, but you can start playing with Polybit’s first offering now via Nodal’s CLI: hosted PostgreSQL.

Hosted PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL kind of a pain to install? Running Windows and have to search for your own PostgreSQL install docs? Maybe you just want to test your project on somebody else’s computer with your development database. No problem. Nodal 0.12 makes this very easy.

We do this via integration with Polybit’s cloud services, available from the command line. The steps you’ll want to take are…

$ nodal poly:register
$ nodal poly:login
$ nodal poly:db:create [project-name] --development

You’ll likely get a notice that you have 950 credits remaining. Polybit’s infrastructure services are based on usage of credits, and you’re granted 1,000 just for signing up. We’ll be providing more information on this in the coming weeks, but for now we’re happy to top up some heavy-use early adopter accounts as people play around with our services.

Cloud Deployment Services

Aside from just creating databases, you can also try out Polybit’s cloud deployment services. By creating a new project using nodal poly:new, you set up a project (50 credits), database (50 credits) and deploy a project (10 credits).

$ nodal poly:new [project-name]

If you already have an existing project you can run nodal poly:compile, which only does a deployment (10 credits) and migration.

$ nodal poly:compile [project-name]

… Remember, Still in Beta!

Note that these features are still in beta, we appreciate as much patience as you can offer, but we’re happy to deal with any and all issues as quickly as possible via Nodal’s GitHub repository. Open an issue and we’ll tackle it.

You’re restricted to 3 databases and 3 live projects during the beta phase as we figure out usage patterns, pricing, and work on pushing out more features.

Free Credits!

If you run out of your 1,000 free credits while using our services, please reach out on Gitter and I’d love to talk about your use case and top you up for the time being. We’re committed to providing the best experience possible and we’ll be rolling out the ability to fill up your account on your own shortly.

Other Nodal 0.12 Additions

Nodal 0.12 comes with some great additions. We’re moving to a cleaner codebase overall, starting to remove some technical debt and legacy patterns and styles. We’re also continuing to add features.

Cleaner Codebase

We’ve eliminated the IIFEs in all Nodal core files and generated templates. It was a design choice meant to increase clarity and readability early on, but ultimately was unnecessary overhead. Functionality has not changed.

Features and Updates

• nodal db:bootstrap now drops, recreates, prepares, migrates and seeds your database
• nodal db:compose is responsible for preparing, migrating and seeding your database
• Model#update can now be used to bypass validations / verifications and update a model value directly, which piggybacks off of…
• Composer#update which now accepts functions as values, which will allow you to compose and update with whatever SQL values you wish. For example:

Blog.query().update({
  views: views => `${views} + 10`
}, (err, blogs) => {
  // all blogs now have 10 more views
}); 

Next Steps

Things are going to start moving a lot faster. You can expect many more features focused on making the Nodal experience, from development to production, completely seamless. The team is growing rapidly and we’d love to have you as part of the community.

Don’t hesitate to contribute to or keep an eye on Nodal’s GitHub repository. follow @polybit on Twitter for the most up-to-date news about Nodal and future cloud services offerings.

Hey — I’m Keith. I’m the author of Nodal and founder of Polybit, where we’re focused on making application development and infrastructure management as painless as possible for developers, teams and companies.

Follow me on Twitter, @keithwhor, or e-mail me directly. Firstname at polybit dot com. We’re always looking for talented engineers that enjoying crafting helpful solutions for others. If that’s you, would love to chat.