Dream and psychic are in a pre-release stage. We are still refining some cosmetic aspects to the framework, but that code is coming in rapidly, and we anticipate this will be ready for use sometime early April, 2025. In the mean time, feel free to tinker to your heart's desire!
Installation
To create a new psychic app, you can use the psychic app provisioner via npx, like so:
# if you would like your app's name to be "howyadoin"
npx @rvoh/create-psychic howyadoin
This will prompt you to ask a few questions, and then provision a new psychic app for you in the "howyadoin" folder of your current directory. All of your dependencies will be automatically installed (for both your server and client apps, if you are generating with a client) and committed to a new git repo.
repos
The source code for Dream and Psychic are separated, with the intention that dream would be usable outside of psychic, if you so desired. This is of course, possible, since Psychic itself is a Dream application, but we have not made any attempts to utilize Dream without Psychic, and would discourage it in practice, given that you lose much of the powerful integration that makes writing Dream applications so seamless, including the built-in OpenAPI integration that dream can bind into.
In addition to these repos, Dream and Psychic also provide spec helpers, as well as background jobs and websockets. The repos for each of those plugins can be found here:
package managers
Though our app provisioner is driven by npx, we offer you a choice when provisioning your new Psychic application between yarn, npm, and pnpm. Most of our examples throughout the documentation will reference yarn, since this is the default, tried and true method used by the core team. However, if you would rather not use yarn (believe us, we get it, the nodejs package management ecosystem is in chaos right now), we recommend you use one of the other options we formally support.
You may be tempted to reach for bun, but we have not formally built our application to support it just yet. As of now, bun has issues with TypeScript 5 generators See here for updates on this issue. There could be a potential path forward for bun, but as of right now we recommend you stick with one of the package managers we officially support.
esm
Psychic and Dream libraries are built on modern esm patterns, including the latest TypeScript 5 decorators. There is a very large rift in the nodejs community due to the move towards esm. Most important libraries out there have made the transition at this point, but several are stuck behind, especially those that rely on previous proposals for TypeScript decorators, which were much more friendly with regards to meta programming, and have made it very difficult for those stuck behind to adapt.
local dependencies
In order for you to run your local dev server, you will need to have the following other dependencies installed:
node >= 20.9.0
postgres >= 13.4
redis >= 7.2.0 # (only if using websockets or workers)
You will need postgres and redis to be running locally for this to work, and if your credentials are different than those set up in your local .env and .env.test files, those credentials will need to be set/updated to reflect.
installing Dream without Psychic
This is possible, but we have not completed the provisioning tools necessary to provide this feature just yet.