Can feathers co exist with routs managed out side of feathers - feathersjs

Question

We have a large app which uses express for rest and primus for socket routes. It would be very hard to convert all to feathers at once. I am thinking of phased approach where I could take some routes and convert them to services and of cause any new routes will follow the service pattern. I will slowly migrate the rest of the app.
The client is using primus and angularjs $http for now to communicate with nodejs.
our current set up looks like
var http = require('http');
var express = require('express');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var cookieParser = require('cookie-parser');
const csrf = require('csurf');
var Primus = require('primus');
var SocketService = require('./../services/socket-service'); ////this handles existing socket routes from primus client using spark.write
var routesUtils = require('../utilities/routes-utility');
var _ = require('lodash');
module.exports = function(isClusteredDeploy) {
var app = express();
var server = http.createServer(app);
var primus = new Primus(server, {transformer: 'uws'});
var socketService = SocketService(primus);
var commonSocketRoute, commonRoute;
//primus.library();
//primus.save(__dirname + '/primus-client.js');
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({
extended: true
}));
app.use(bodyParser.json({
strict: false,
limit: '1mb'
}));
app.use(cookieParser());
app.use(csrf({ cookie: true }));
app.use(function (err, req, res, next) {
if (err.code !== 'EBADCSRFTOKEN') {
return next(err);
}
res.status(403);
res.send();
});
app.use(function(req, res, next) {
res.cookie('XSRF-TOKEN', req.csrfToken());
next();
});
server.listen(config.get(constants.CONFIG_App_Port), function() {
log.info('App server ==> %s is listening on port %d', config.get('rest_host_config.' + config.get('app_key') + '.host'),
config.get(constants.CONFIG_App_Port));
});
//dynamically loading rest routes and socket routes from the file system
var files = routesUtils.readRoutes(true);
files.forEach(function(file) {
if (_.includes(file, 'socket')) {
commonSocketRoute = require('./../../' + file);
commonSocketRoute(socketService);
} else {
commonRoute = require('./../../' + file);
commonRoute(app);
}
});
};
I'd like to add feathers in this and then slowly start converting. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Yes, with the standard #feathersjs/express framework integration your Feathers application will also be a fully Express compatible application which additionally allows to register services.
In your case you would replace var app = express(); with:
const feathers = require('#feathersjs/feathers');
const express = require('#feathersjs/express');
// Create an app that is a Feathers AND Express application
const app = express(feathers());
// Set up REST services (optional)
app.configure(express.rest());
And everything should continue to work as normal. The next step would be to replace the custom Primus code with the #feathersjs/primus framework adapter:
const feathers = require('#feathersjs/feathers');
const express = require('#feathersjs/express');
const primus = require('#feathersjs/primus');
// Create an app that is a Feathers AND Express application
const app = express(feathers());
// Set up Primus with SockJS
app.configure(primus({ transformer: 'ws' }));
Now you can also replace the http.createServer setup with a more simple
const server = app.listen(config.get(constants.CONFIG_App_Port))
Since Feathers will handle all the Express and Primus initialization. The Primus instance will be available as app.primus.