InversifyJS

A powerful and lightweight inversion of control container for JavaScript & Node.js apps powered by TypeScript.

About

InversifyJS is a lightweight inversion of control (IoC) container for TypeScript and JavaScript apps. An IoC container uses a class constructor to identify and inject its dependencies. InversifyJS has a friendly API and encourages the usage of the best OOP and IoC practices.

Motivation

JavaScript now supports object oriented (OO) programming with class based inheritance. These features are great but the truth is that they are also dangerous.

We need a good OO design (SOLID, Composite Reuse, etc.) to protect ourselves from these threats. The problem is that OO design is difficult and that is exactly why we created InversifyJS.

InversifyJS is a tool that helps JavaScript developers write code with good OO design.

Philosophy

InversifyJS has been developed with 4 main goals:

Allow JavaScript developers to write code that adheres to the SOLID principles.
Facilitate and encourage the adherence to the best OOP and IoC practices.
Add as little runtime overhead as possible.
Provide a state of the art development experience.

Testimonies

Nate Kohari - Author of Ninject

"Nice work! I've taken a couple shots at creating DI frameworks for JavaScript and TypeScript, but the lack of RTTI really hinders things. The ES7 metadata gets us part of the way there (as you've discovered). Keep up the great work!"

Michel Weststrate - Author of MobX

Dependency injection like InversifyJS works nicely

Some companies using InversifyJS

📦 Installation

You can get the latest release and the type definitions using your preferred package manager:

> npm install inversify reflect-metadata --save
> yarn add inversify reflect-metadata
> pnpm add inversify reflect-metadata

❕Hint! If you want to use a more type-safe version of reflect-metadata, try @abraham/reflection

The InversifyJS type definitions are included in the inversify npm package.

:warning: Important! InversifyJS requires TypeScript >= 4.4 and the experimentalDecorators, emitDecoratorMetadata, types and lib compilation options in your tsconfig.json file.

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "target": "es5",
        "lib": ["es6"],
        "types": ["reflect-metadata"],
        "module": "commonjs",
        "moduleResolution": "node",
        "experimentalDecorators": true,
        "emitDecoratorMetadata": true
    }
}

InversifyJS requires a modern JavaScript engine with support for:

Reflect metadata
Map
Promise (Only required if using provider injection)
Proxy (Only required if using activation handlers)

If your environment doesn't support one of these you will need to import a shim or polyfill.

:warning: The reflect-metadata polyfill should be imported only once in your entire application because the Reflect object is meant to be a global singleton. More details about this can be found here.

Check out the Environment support and polyfills page in the wiki and the Basic example to learn more.

The Basics

Let’s take a look at the basic usage and APIs of InversifyJS with TypeScript:

Step 1: Declare your interfaces and types

Our goal is to write code that adheres to the dependency inversion principle. This means that we should "depend upon Abstractions and do not depend upon concretions". Let's start by declaring some interfaces (abstractions).

// file interfaces.ts

export interface Warrior {
    fight(): string;
    sneak(): string;
}

export interface Weapon {
    hit(): string;
}

export interface ThrowableWeapon {
    throw(): string;
}

InversifyJS needs to use the type as identifiers at runtime. We use symbols as identifiers but you can also use classes and or string literals.

PLEASE MAKE SURE TO PLACE THIS TYPES DECLARATION IN A SEPARATE FILE. (see bug #1455)

// file types.ts

const TYPES = {
    Warrior: Symbol.for("Warrior"),
    Weapon: Symbol.for("Weapon"),
    ThrowableWeapon: Symbol.for("ThrowableWeapon")
};

export { TYPES };

Note: It is recommended to use Symbols but InversifyJS also support the usage of Classes and string literals (please refer to the features section to learn more).

Step 2: Declare dependencies using the `@injectable` & `@inject` decorators

Let's continue by declaring some classes (concretions). The classes are implementations of the interfaces that we just declared. All the classes must be annotated with the @injectable decorator.

When a class has a dependency on an interface we also need to use the @inject decorator to define an identifier for the interface that will be available at runtime. In this case we will use the Symbols Symbol.for("Weapon") and Symbol.for("ThrowableWeapon") as runtime identifiers.

// file entities.ts

import { injectable, inject } from "inversify";
import "reflect-metadata";
import { Weapon, ThrowableWeapon, Warrior } from "./interfaces";
import { TYPES } from "./types";

@injectable()
class Katana implements Weapon {
    public hit() {
        return "cut!";
    }
}

@injectable()
class Shuriken implements ThrowableWeapon {
    public throw() {
        return "hit!";
    }
}

@injectable()
class Ninja implements Warrior {

    private _katana: Weapon;
    private _shuriken: ThrowableWeapon;

    public constructor(
	    @inject(TYPES.Weapon) katana: Weapon,
	    @inject(TYPES.ThrowableWeapon) shuriken: ThrowableWeapon
    ) {
        this._katana = katana;
        this._shuriken = shuriken;
    }

    public fight() { return this._katana.hit(); }
    public sneak() { return this._shuriken.throw(); }

}

export { Ninja, Katana, Shuriken };

If you prefer it you can use property injection instead of constructor injection so you don't have to declare the class constructor:

@injectable()
class Ninja implements Warrior {
    @inject(TYPES.Weapon) private _katana: Weapon;
    @inject(TYPES.ThrowableWeapon) private _shuriken: ThrowableWeapon;
    public fight() { return this._katana.hit(); }
    public sneak() { return this._shuriken.throw(); }
}

Step 3: Create and configure a Container

We recommend to do this in a file named inversify.config.ts. This is the only place in which there is some coupling. In the rest of your application your classes should be free of references to other classes.

// file inversify.config.ts

import { Container } from "inversify";
import { TYPES } from "./types";
import { Warrior, Weapon, ThrowableWeapon } from "./interfaces";
import { Ninja, Katana, Shuriken } from "./entities";

const myContainer = new Container();
myContainer.bind<Warrior>(TYPES.Warrior).to(Ninja);
myContainer.bind<Weapon>(TYPES.Weapon).to(Katana);
myContainer.bind<ThrowableWeapon>(TYPES.ThrowableWeapon).to(Shuriken);

export { myContainer };

Step 4: Resolve dependencies

You can use the method get<T> from the Container class to resolve a dependency. Remember that you should do this only in your composition root to avoid the service locator anti-pattern.

import { myContainer } from "./inversify.config";
import { TYPES } from "./types";
import { Warrior } from "./interfaces";

const ninja = myContainer.get<Warrior>(TYPES.Warrior);

expect(ninja.fight()).eql("cut!"); // true
expect(ninja.sneak()).eql("hit!"); // true

As we can see the Katana and Shuriken were successfully resolved and injected into Ninja.

InversifyJS supports ES5 and ES6 and can work without TypeScript. Head to the JavaScript example to learn more!