Why I chose 'routing-controllers' over 'tsoa' for building routing and documenting APIs.

routing-controllers
It is decorator-based, meaning you can use decorators to define your routes and controllers. It also provides a simpler and more intuitive approach to routing by allowing you to define your routes and controllers in a way that is easy to read and understand.

tsoa
It is code-generation and uses decorators. It takes your TypeScript code, looks for decorators, generates the necessary express routes, and the OpenAPI specification for your API. It aims to provide a more automated and less error-prone approach to API development by using TypeScript decorators to describe your API.

both of them are type-safe.
using class-validator, you can validate the request body, params, query, and headers.

routing-controllers
It is decorator-based, with a variety of decorators for fine-grained control. It provides a lot of decorators for customization. It also supports a wide range of middleware and libraries.

tsoa
It is code-generation with limited customization options. It generates boilerplate code, saving time and effort. But it can be less flexible and require additional setups such as a tsoa config file for building a routing file & an open API JSON file.

routing-controllers is more flexible than tsoa.
It can use its existing middleware. Also, unlike tsoa, you can use express.req and express.res inside the controller.

routing-controllers
It automatically generates OpenAPI (Swagger) schema object.
Generates OpenAPI (Swagger) specs automatically without any handling option. But it needs to use third-party libraries, such as routing-controllers-openapi and class-validator-jsonschema.

tsoa
It automatically generates OpenAPI (Swagger) JSON file.
Supports customizing the generated documentation. It generates OpenAPI (Swagger) specs automatically. But it can be less flexible and require additional setups such as a tsoa config file for building a routing file & an open API JSON file below.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

{
  ...
  "scripts": {
    "build": "tsoa spec-and-routes -c=tsoa.production.json  && tsc -p ./",
    "dev": "cross-env NODE_ENV=development concurrently \"nodemon -x tsoa spec-and-routes -c=tsoa.json\" \"nodemon\"",
  }
  ...
}

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

{
  "entryFile": "src/server.ts",
  "noImplicitAdditionalProperties": "throw-on-extras",
  "controllerPathGlobs": ["src/**/*.controller.ts"],
  "spec": {
    "host": "localhost:3000",
    "basePath": "/api",
    "schemes": ["http"],
    "outputDirectory": "src",
    "specVersion": 3
  },
  "routes": {
    "routesDir": "src",
    "basePath": "/api"
  },
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": "src",
    "paths": {
      "@/*": ["*"]
    },
    "ignoreFiles": ["src/**/*.test.ts", "src/**/*.test.tsx", "src/**/*.test.js", "src/**/*.test.jsx"]
  }
}

tsoa is more convenient, but routing-controllers is more flexible.