Summary
In this chapter, we learned about the importance of plugins and how the Fastify boot process works. Everything in Fastify can and really should be put in a plugin. It is the base building block of scalable and maintainable applications, thanks to encapsulation and a predictable loading order. Furthermore, we can use fastify-plugin
to control the default encapsulation and manage dependencies between plugins.
We learned how our applications are nothing more than a bunch of Fastify plugins that work together. Some are used to encapsulate routers, using prefixes to namespace them. Others are used to add core functionalities, such as connections to databases or some other external systems. In addition to that, we can install and use core and community plugins directly from npm.
Moreover, we covered the boot process’s asynchronous nature and how every step can be awaited if needed. It is guaranteed that if any error is encountered during the loading of plugins, the boot...