Zod Schema Validation and Type Generation

a bunch of other things. So it's it's,

Are using and kind of end up using Zod maybe without even knowing it. But Yeah. I bet that I I always go to the dependents a tab on npm and say, like, what is using this? I kind of wish you could you could sort the dependents

Oh, yeah. Projects.

based on, like, popular

seems to be using it. Astro.

validations, which is really cool. So If you needed to, like, ping an API to validate data as legit

So that's a big one. Oh, yeah. Aster is a big dog. Interesting. One thing that we didn't talk about here is that they also have asynchronous,

What's the best? What's the Fire CMS I know I was trying to it. Trying to do away without actually insinuating that Linode would give you $1,000,000 because they won't.

or just check it, call a database to make sure that that user actually exists,

log in. You can set up all kinds of administrative spin up a Minecraft server on Linode because I wanted to I wanted to put my Minecraft server that I have locally. I wanted to put it on the Internet so that, you know, perhaps you know, with TypeScript, Hey, everybody. Excited to be here. Excited to talk about Zod. I know. It's one of those names you gotta kinda say like that. West did like a whole face when he said Zod.

when you have your own server like that, you can control all sorts of kinds of things, whether that be, like, rules around that server or or rollbacks or Different plugins or extras that you're adding on to it because the game has this just

Yeah. And his son is, like, 9 years old, and he is getting into

there's, like, creative mode and

Other people we need to talk about that because my so my,

privileges. And, Welcome to syntax on this Monday. Hasty treat. We're gonna be talking about Do you have a MongoDB schema as well, or is that somehow based off of this? It's based off of it. So MongoDB I don't know if you know this, Wes, but there Mongo has a validation baked in. So many people use Mongoose. Right? Amazing. The types of infrastructure built around this thing. It's it's very, truly wild.

sister's kid what do you call sister's kid? I'm an uncle. He's my nephew. He's your nephew. My sister's kid. He's my nephew, and,

Travis Nielsen who's doing the design for our site. He's been on Syntax before. He was it. Telling me that his son is really into the language.

he keeps

Like, I mean, you know how big the game is, but the game has a massive Zod

online scratch competitions that are just, like, happening in scratch forums, and it just reminded me of, like, the old web in such a wonderful way where people are just it. They're they're trying out their their kids doing, like, little drops and remixes of each other's little scratch programs, and he, like, made a little scratch program that was just like a motion graphic to welcome us when we visited them, and it was just like, man, this is such a cool little world. There's so many cool little pockets of the Internet of people doing fun stuff and sharing it and just, like, really embracing that old school style of the web.

and it still shocks me at, like man, it's it's Check out this number, Wes. It has 1,200,000 schema in all of your different applications

local sir server, so I've got all kinds of, I put some more RAM in it. It went from 4 to 16 gigs. I need to do that now.

Yeah. Maybe we need an entire show on this. I think it's It'd be kind of interesting. I also just juiced up my,

Love that. Love that. That's really cool. Yep. Okay. Sorry. Let's get back on track. Back on track to talk about Zod. Now, Zod, what is Zod? Why might you use it? Where can you find out more about it? What's the use case here? [email protected].

so you can put domain names on each of them. It's awesome. You wanna check it out. Linode.comforward/syntax.

you can just sign up and get a Linux box, And you can run whatever you want on that box. And that includes running as many things as you want on those that box. There's obviously there's obviously limits to the resources, but See,

I think with a lot of lot of services

So head on over to logrocket.comforward/syntax.

Sign up and get 14 days for free. Let's talk about Linode as well. Linode is cloud computing developers Trust. I'm gonna talk about one thing that I love about Linode,

or you can just run multiple thing. I personally use something called PM 2,

that make you

node in docker. You can run multiple instances

and that is the fact that if you are doing any sort of API and you're bringing data in from

on Linux servers to run multiple applications all at once. You can use Nginx,

So you're MongoDB.

like, a, to define the shape of your data, Perhaps you have some data issues. You're having some bugs pop up because your data isn't parsed correctly, or perhaps you're trying to parse your data and it's failing that validation step. Perhaps you're you're trying to pass some data in there, and it's causing a bug or error on your site. And you know what? Zod can actually throw errors from data validation issues. So Maybe perhaps you're seeing that error pop up in your site, and it's popping up in your LogRocket.

The function that is part of the community. We'll talk a little bit about this in a second, but I run it through a function called zod to JSON schema.

anywhere that's accessing this data is going to be beholden to the same validation rules because it's, it. Literally saved to the database. So Okay. I what I do is I take my Zod schema, and then I run it through Oh my God. But that JSON schema is what MongoDB uses. However, dot infer, J o I is is the library. I've used Joy in the past. Yeah. Yep. So the the big difference here is that Joy doesn't use static type inference.

MongoDB has a JSON validation

that you can define at the database level. So instead of defining that in your code, it's defined at the database level. Therefore, you don't have to have, And then you infer your types from that schema. So if you're the type of person who is defining a schema CSD.

But, generated. I'm using quotes here because they're Technically inferred, meaning that they are just they are inferred. That's the they're they're return. You could think of it as like CS. A function is going off and then getting the tights even yeah. Exactly.

specific validations. If you want to have a type that is only 5 characters or you want to have something that is a phone number or

TypeScript doesn't do that. It doesn't have validation

If you do need the validation in your application, you don't obviously, you're obviously not relying on TypeScript for that type of thing because that's compile time. You use this at runtime.

Something that starts with a t.

so this is kind of nice because

in the world. You know, pay per application that you're running on, it. That can get expensive really quickly, especially if you just have lots of fun little projects and you just wanna throw them all into 1 single box. With Leno, you can sign up, you get access to Linux box, you could throw a docker on there, and then you could run

you could.

built into it. If the only valid and whenever I say this, people say, well, you can List every possible option. I was like, Yeah, you're not going to make a union of every possible phone number

in free credit.

It's gonna get you one a $100

Thank you, Linode, for sponsoring.

we've had to do this in our API to say, alright. Let's hand write the types of what this actually is because maybe the types for our database are different than the types that are coming out of our API. Maybe they're different in these sort of ways or maybe this shape of data is something that we have to kind of duplicate its functionality.

But With Zod, you just write your schema and then you use a little bit of, Validation error. Zod Formic adapter. You know how many people are using Formic? You can get, the the version of this plug in is a newer version of JSON schema. So then I kinda had to adapt another function that just tweaks it just a little bit to make it happy to remove some of the modern Keywords that the the,

And it literally spits out the TypeScript types

with static type

Zod does a really good job of that.

which means that you define your schema newer version of JSON schema uses, but it's a strength of XOD. And maybe we can talk about this now before we get into maybe the comparisons, it. Is that there is this big ecosystem of third party plug ins. So you have things like API libraries. Like, tRPC can use XOD to do all of its validation,

Down to anything you could possibly want to happen there there, whether it's required or it's enums or any of that sort of stuff. It just kind of works.

Or you're defining you the shape of your data, and then you're also having to define your types. Like in the past, And while it's a small little thing, it matches the way you think in TypeScript to the point where when you're working with Xod, if you are experienced in TypeScript at all, Even though the the syntax you're writing this stuff in is slightly different, Nest JS GraphQL It's a part of,

at its base base level doesn't necessarily sound super exciting when you when you think about it. It Is TypeScript 1st schema validation I'm waiting for Black Friday, I think, and I'll I'll jump on that train. Good call. Before we get into that, I did wanna Actually, you know, just talking really quickly about that Minecraft thing reminded me of, was a bit surprising to me because It was only a few shows ago when we saw uses Zod,

Do it well. And then at the end of the day, ship a library that is, like, inference, Yeah. And it's a small library. You know, there's a lot of, like, really great extra little tools in here like, Like, kinda face. Yeah. This episode is also sponsored by 2 amazing companies, whatever. And it reads so much better when you have a complex schema that I found, XOD endpoints, XOD Nest JS. So you have, like, API connections to this thing. There's a lot of, like, form integrations.

So some of these things that seems like XADA is basically what it's done is it's taken, Scratch, is is a really, really great feature of this thing. The fact that you don't have to define the shape of your data twice, you can just define the shape of your data and Automatically get your TypeScript types out of that is a really useful feature to have. And especially because

the ideas of all of these other tools and it's like, what if we just did it, it. Customize and mod community around it. It is just like I I was on this site looking at mods for it, and I was just like, There's just this whole world. The I mean, I I've been playing Minecraft since,

object methods again.

With everything,

this one has a little bit more, but it's missing promise schemas, missing function schemas, it. None jquence.

the tastiest web development treats coming again hot. Here is Wes Barracuda

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Monday. Monday. Monday.

Open wide dev fans, get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing, soft skill, web development, the hastiest,

Boss and Scott

Now what is LogRocket? It's a video session replay that gives you access to it. Not only just seeing how your users are using your stuff, but it also gives you access to solving bugs really easily. So let's say you had your Zod Validation error throw. It throws and perhaps your, And then you can go ahead and investigate this. And because Zod gives really good errors, you could see that error in the console or, the network tab or wherever you're consuming that error. Either way, Log Rocket's got your back because you can use a scribble video replay to see how that error is affecting your users.

your LogRocket is there to catch and see that error happening,

And then you can You there's a express as a API,

share that data shape again.

honestly feeling very nice because, Both of these companies actually could kinda fit in into data validation, right, if you think about it. If you're building a service, maybe you're building, like, a a data API or something like that, you could always host on Linode. And just like that, with LogRocket, All object fields are optional by default. So instead of required by default, it. It's missing object message methods like partial or deep partial. It's missing promise, schemas, function schemas, union, and intersection schemas. Okay.

So that's like a nice thing.

And your schema Ends up then looking a little bit more complex. You get an object with a bunch of extra properties in it. What's the type? What's this, that? And with this, you end up just kind of chaining methods upon each other to say it's a dot string, dot optional, Linode and LogRocket.

Working with it practically to be very nice. So, you know, all this said, why would you use it? Well, So, you can do that. I love that idea of it's not just a regex against certain types of strings and numbers. It's you literally can wait for it to go Look something up for you. Yeah. It's it's a funny one of those types of libraries we don't necessarily think of it as being, like, the sexy thing out there, but it, I found it to be super useful and, non empty arrays with proper typing And it ends up it. You know, your validation's directly Zod is a project

we're using it to

And I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second. We're using it to literally define our schema.

if you've worked it all with schemas, you'll know that many times, schemas can have some additional information. It's required. Here's the default value.

or you'd use, like, magic strings to say, like, name is a type of A string of the word string. Right? Yeah. Where with Zod, you have to import z. And it seems like it's extra work to say name is a type of z dot string and string as a method on z. You're like, this feels like I'm just doing an extra step. But at the end of the day, it's what allows Zod to work the way it does.

You know, it's this or that.

and what it is, You know wow.

we'll be talking about all that and more in this episode. My name is Scott Tillinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me as always is

how it uses a scheme of validation and type generation to make your life easier when working with data. It. But more most importantly, why anyone would even use something like XOD? What is its place, and why are you starting to see it pop up everywhere nowadays? It's one of those projects that has been it. Catching a little bit of hype for what it is, and it's a really neat project at the end of the day, for something it's as it's it. As neat of a project as you could have around day data validation as as one exists. So, correctly. Right? If you're trying to parse the data and it's not Matching your schema, like, how do you handle that? Do you throw an error? Do downloads a week.

Wes Bos.

what I'm understanding that this is is that You basically you have to write your validations anyway. So write those first, The other thing that I'm curious about, and I think I know the answer to this, is if you

the client,

you are very likely have to validate That data and you have some sort of validation library in there. You build your validations to go ahead and do it. So

and then they are

largely have been super impressed with this thing.

So, yeah, head on over to zod.dev.

Yeah. And next thing you know, it's it's in my code base. So, a, like, time where I'm like, 1,200,000

it's one of those tools that you might not get at first why you might use this thing, but it's fun To at least have in your toolbox. The last thing I wanted to talk about in this episode was they did some comparisons between other like libraries. So If you're using one of these other libraries, I I do just a quick run through of some of these comparisons because I think it is it it's helpful in understanding a little bit about Zod's strengths.

So I'm definitely in the honeymoon phase of Zod where I'm like, this this thing rules. I'm, all hail Zod. I'm a big Zod fan right now. But, you know, we'll see. It has a massive amount of users, which

and then we looked at how many people were using Zod, and we're like, what is this? What is this? you know, it's not just people straight up using well, it's not a part of tRPC. I'm sorry. It's something that frequently people use with tRPC.

It's like you type or you get a the I can't stop laughing at the fact that a validation library has, like, a a community behind it and all this So That's really what it comes down to. There's a lot of these other libraries, and and I'll talk a little bit about maybe the comparisons between some of them. Zod has a really good page for that. But if you need to define the shape of your data, this is a good tool. So like I said, type inference But it it is is a part of a lot of different tools, I think, that people, Well, with Zod, you have to explicitly state if something is optional.

They have a Discord.

and give it a try. All right. Sweet. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We'll catch you on

stuff. Yeah. It's, it's wild. But it it's a a great library, and I've been a big fan of it so far. And, again, I I think this thing is definitely worth checking out. It's worth having in your toolbox. A lot of people might be looking for this very thing or maybe they're not happy with what they're using, and, maybe Zod's gonna be here to take over. So check it out, zod.dev, you continue? Do you do, like, a soft and and fill in kind of default data? Like, what what do you do If the data isn't matching the shape correctly,

Which is a form using Zad, which is a great name as well. There's a lot of different things. You know, I mentioned Zad to JSON schema, but there's also Zad to t s, In in Sometimes, you know, when I first looked at Zod, I I have to admit it turned me off a little bit because in others schema based libraries that I've used in the past, massive.

I see. So it sort of just ripples through your whole application.

I wrote my own. My auto form library that I wrote it. Takes my Zod schema and spits out a form. I mean, that's just my own custom thing, but there's React form, from that data, you can infer the TypeScript types, Which are extremely helpful in the rest of your application when you're working with data. Correct? Correct. And there's some neat stuff in here. Now they get quite a bit into the whole parsing versus validating, which If we're being entirely honest, it's a bit over my head as, like, just the type of person who typically works with this stuff, but there's some interesting reading on their docs page. It. It it handles the error handling if you wanted to do hard errors, if the data doesn't fit Joy is one of the libraries that people have been using from Happy JS.

React hook form, which you can pass in the Zod EMA, and it will it will give you a form and to validate your form. Yeah.

Zod generates Nest GraphQL model classes from Zod's schemas.

Although, this is mocking library. So if you want to generate fake data for your tests based on your Zod schema, that's super handy.

it. I said this thing is small.

That those are some wild numbers, don't you think, for a a schema validation library?

downloads a week.

Let me pop open exactly how small it is. It's, Here's our army. It's optional. Here's the default value.

It's a part of tRPC.

Like, it still blows my mind. It must be.

I let's confirm this database thing. I just want to ask you a question because that was my Question is, can you also use this for your database? So you create your XOD,

I

JSON.

you can generate those to TypeScript, but then you can also export it

If you type something, that type is required by default. You say Scott is a type of string.

there's also, like, a a neat feature that seems like it's, like, not That novel, but at the end of the day is, like, a really nice feature to have is that your type is required by default. So as in, like, 2011,

You have it. To do extra work to say that this is possibly undefined or possibly no. Right? But many validation libraries are the exact opposite. Opposite. Yeah. Yeah. Where you have to specifically So, basically, if you need a schema

It. It supports, say that this thing is required.

Yeah. Yep. It's it's definitely pretty widely used. Yep. It's a full featured library that is first implemented in Vanilla and then later real rewritten in TypeScript.

I o dot or I o t s is, and then you have the flat brackets type of, and then you pass in the schema.

casting and transforms.

And so that is from what I'm understanding is that's A kind of a validation first. You you define

your data. This is a string. This is a string that has to start with a t.

So the database itself will block additions if that doesn't fit the data. So We are able to, out of 1 schema, get database validation.

We use that same schema definition to validate our data it. At the database level, so our Mongo uses it as a JSON validator.

We're able to get our types, and those types are able to be passed it from not only the client side, but the server side. So my whole application

it matches 1 to 1 exactly how you think about TypeScript types when you're developing your schemas for the data that you're working with.

So you that type inference is not something you get in Joy. So that means you have to write your types As well as your validations.

Have I figured out what the limit was at one point. It's a lot.

No, I think that's right. The one thing we've talked about is TypeScript doesn't do This is a number this is a number between 6 and 7, has to be an email address. And then,

Slank.

a validation.

Zod, beautiful.

I love that. Yeah. Single source of truth. Yeah. Yeah.

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You. Face. Head on over to syntax.fm John Phil come across in the recording, but you did, like, a really good Zod, open API, Zod, fast check.

Friday. Wednesday.

$100.

I was actually just looking up the other day, Wes or when I say the other day, I mean yesterday, on how to,

Key of extend, merge, pick, omit, partial, d partial, required, pass through, strict, strip, catch all. Like, there's a lot of, like, great little helpers inside of Zod. And I've I haven't necessarily found uses 1 type definition for one thing, and that's passed Everywhere, whether that's coming in or out of the database, that's using its server side, that's using its client side, and the only single source of truth on that thing is the Zod schema. And that's pretty magical, I gotta say. So

man, this thing just doesn't do what I wanted to do right now.

Exod.