First look at medusa-extender

As we have seen in the previous articles, medusa offers many fantastic customizable options.
However, sometimes we might even want to go beyond that, and that's precisely where medusa-extender comes in.

We can use medusa-extender to extend things out of the box more efficiently as it handles most of the logic.

In this article, we'll look at installing it and how to enable it in our project.

Installing medusa-extender

If you are following along, please ensure you have the medusa server setup.

From there, open your terminal, navigate to the project root, and run the following command.

npm i medusa-extender

From there, we can run the init function, which does all the heavy lifting.

./node_modules/.bin/medex init

This command will ensure all our packages are there. We are running the project in TypeScript mode and changing our package commands.

You'll also note a new modules folder is created in your src directory.
This contains some examples of a module/router and service.

By inspecting these files, we quickly learn that there are many cool things we can use out of the box.
For example, the router has a requiredAuth function built in.

We can quickly spool up our server in dev mode: npm start and check out this new route. (localhost:9000/admin/custom-route)

You can try and change the auth required to see the change from it being required, yes or no.

What can medusa-extender create?

Let's look at all the things medusa-extender can help us with.

• Entity: Create a new entity representing a custom database row. We can even override existing ones
• Repository: A whole repo to interact with custom entities
• Migration: A migration file for managing our database
• Service: To more easily create services, and we can even overwrite existing services
• Middleware: With this, we can create custom middleware as, for example the logged-in user check
• Router: Create custom routes quickly
• Validator: A custom field validator, which is super handy for re-usable checks
• Subscriber: Create a custom subscriber, but more easily with some more formatting
• Module: A custom module that can incorporate multiple modules and components into one place.

In the coming articles, we'll look closely at some of these and how they will work.

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