CLI REPL — nestrs-cli repl

Static DI graph explorer — modules, controllers, routes, providers, and DTOs from your crate’s source.

nestrs-cli repl introspects a nestrs crate by reading its source — no need to launch the binary, no runtime hook required. Useful for:

• answering “what routes does this app expose?” without booting it
• auditing which module owns which providers / controllers
• generating a Markdown table of every DTO
• piping graph data into a script via --format json

The parser is regex-driven (no syn dependency). It recognises #[module(...)], #[controller(prefix = "/...")], #[injectable], #[dto] / mapped-type macros (#[partial_type], #[omit_type], #[pick_type], #[intersection_type]), and HTTP-method macros (#[get] / #[post] / #[put] / #[patch] / #[delete]). Struct names are captured positionally — only types that immediately follow the attribute are added to the graph.

Subcommands

nestrs-cli repl graph

Prints a tree of modules, their imports / controllers / providers, and every controller’s routes.

nestrs DI graph (2 modules, 2 controllers, 2 providers, 2 DTOs)

module UsersModule  (src/users/module.rs)
  controllers: UsersController
  providers:   UsersService
    controller UsersController (prefix = /users)
         GET /users              -> UsersController::list
       POST /users              -> UsersController::create
      PATCH /users/:id          -> UsersController::update

module AppModule  (src/app/module.rs)
  imports:    UsersModule

nestrs-cli repl routes

Flattened, sorted route table — handy for piping into a Markdown doc or an OpenAPI generation script.

METHOD  PATH                                     HANDLER
   GET  /                                        AppController::root
   GET  /health                                  AppController::health
   GET  /users                                   UsersController::list
  POST  /users                                   UsersController::create
 PATCH  /users/:id                               UsersController::update

nestrs-cli repl providers

Groups #[injectable] types by the module that declares them. Providers that aren’t referenced by any module (orphan services) fall under unassigned:.

nestrs-cli repl dtos

Lists every #[dto]-decorated struct (heuristic: name ends with Dto, Entity, or Model).

nestrs-cli repl live

Dumps the running provider and route registries from an app that enabled the admin feature and called use_admin. This is the runtime counterpart of the static scanner: conditional cfg!(feature = …) providers show up here because they actually exist in the process.

nestrs-cli repl live --url http://127.0.0.1:7777
nestrs-cli repl live --url http://127.0.0.1:7777 --bearer-token "$ADMIN_TOKEN" --format json

The CLI shells out to curl:

1. GET {url}/__nestrs/providers
2. GET {url}/__nestrs/routes

Auth is Authorization: Bearer <token> on the header. The token is never accepted as a query string (URLs leak into access logs). curl argv always places -- before the URL so a malformed URL cannot be parsed as a flag. Requires curl on $PATH.

Enable the sidecar:

use nestrs::admin::{AdminOptions, AdminHandle};

let handle: AdminHandle = app.use_admin(AdminOptions {
    addr: "127.0.0.1:7777".parse()?,
    token: Some("secret".into()),
});
tokio::spawn(async move { handle.serve().await });

Flags

• --path <dir> — source root to scan. Defaults to ./src. Use this when your crate’s source lives somewhere non-standard (src-tauri/, services/<name>/src/, etc.).
• --format text|json — text (default) is human-readable; json is machine-readable and round-trips through serde_json.

Examples

# show every HTTP route the current crate exposes
nestrs-cli repl routes

# dump the full DI graph as JSON for a tooling pipeline
nestrs-cli repl graph --format json | jq '.modules[] | .name'

# audit a sub-crate
nestrs-cli repl providers --path services/payments/src

# list DTOs across the whole workspace
nestrs-cli repl dtos --path .

# live providers + routes from a running admin sidecar
nestrs-cli repl live --url http://127.0.0.1:7777 --bearer-token "$ADMIN_TOKEN"

Limitations

• The scanner is static — it does not run your code. Conditional providers (e.g. if cfg!(feature = "x") { ... }) are not modelled.
• impl_routes! blocks that declare routes without #[get("/")] attributes are not extracted (rare in 1.0.0; the common #[controller] + impl + #[get] pattern is fully covered).
• Multi-line #[module(controllers = [\n Foo,\n Bar,\n])] lists parse correctly via [^]]* capture; nested generics in provider types are not parsed.

For these cases, prefer nestrs-cli repl live --url <admin> against a running app with the admin feature, or inspect via your existing logging.