Does NestJS Work With Sanity?

Fully CompatibleLast verified: 2026-02-20

NestJS and Sanity work together seamlessly—use NestJS as your backend API layer and Sanity as your headless CMS for content management.

Quick Facts

Compatibility

full

Setup Difficulty

Easy

Official Integration

No — community maintained

Confidence

high

Minimum Versions

NestJS: 9.0.0

Sanity: 3.0.0

How NestJS Works With Sanity

NestJS and Sanity complement each other perfectly in a headless architecture. NestJS handles your application logic, authentication, and business rules, while Sanity provides a structured content backend with real-time APIs. You'll typically create a NestJS service that calls Sanity's Content Delivery API or Management API to fetch or mutate content. The developer experience is smooth: Sanity's TypeScript client integrates naturally with NestJS's dependency injection pattern, and you can create custom resolvers to enrich Sanity data with application-specific logic. The architecture is clean—your NestJS controllers expose REST/GraphQL endpoints that consume Sanity content, keeping concerns separated. Real-time features work great too; Sanity's listener can trigger NestJS webhooks or you can use their real-time API for live updates. The main architectural win is that content editors use Sanity's studio while developers build features in NestJS without coupling.

Best Use Cases

→Multi-language blog platforms with dynamic content—Sanity handles translations, NestJS handles routing and SEO metadata

→E-commerce product catalogs—Sanity manages product info and descriptions, NestJS handles inventory, pricing, and orders

→Headless marketing sites with rich media—Sanity's asset pipeline + NestJS APIs for forms, analytics, and personalization

→Real-time collaborative documentation systems—Sanity for content collaboration, NestJS for access control and versioning

Quick Setup

bash

npm install @nestjs/common @nestjs/core @sanity/client

typescript

import { Injectable } from '@nestjs/common';
import { createClient } from '@sanity/client';

@Injectable()
export class SanityService {
  private client = createClient({
    projectId: process.env.SANITY_PROJECT_ID,
    dataset: process.env.SANITY_DATASET,
    apiVersion: '2024-01-01',
    token: process.env.SANITY_TOKEN,
    useCdn: true,
  });

  async getPosts() {
    return this.client.fetch(`*[_type == "post"] | order(_createdAt desc)`);
  }

  async getPostBySlug(slug: string) {
    return this.client.fetch(
      `*[_type == "post" && slug.current == $slug][0]`,
      { slug }
    );
  }
}

// In your controller:
import { Controller, Get, Param } from '@nestjs/common';

@Controller('posts')
export class PostsController {
  constructor(private sanity: SanityService) {}

  @Get()
  async list() {
    return this.sanity.getPosts();
  }

  @Get(':slug')
  async getOne(@Param('slug') slug: string) {
    return this.sanity.getPostBySlug(slug);
  }
}

Known Issues & Gotchas

warning

Sanity API rate limits can throttle high-traffic NestJS apps during content queries

Fix: Implement caching in NestJS using Redis or in-memory stores; use Sanity's webhook system to invalidate cache on content changes rather than polling

info

CORS issues when calling Sanity API from NestJS running on different ports during development

Fix: Configure NestJS CORS middleware properly and ensure your Sanity project token has appropriate permissions; CORS is not an issue in production with proper deployment

warning

Type safety between Sanity schema and NestJS DTOs can drift if not automated

Fix: Use Sanity's TypeGen or @sanity/types to auto-generate TypeScript types from your schema, then import into NestJS

info

Asset URLs from Sanity may need transformation for responsive images in your NestJS responses

Fix: Use Sanity's image URL builder (@sanity/image-url) within NestJS services to generate optimized URLs with size parameters

Alternatives

•Next.js with Sanity—simpler for full-stack JS/TS apps but less flexibility for complex backend logic
•Express.js with Contentful—lighter alternative but lacks NestJS's built-in structure and DI container
•Strapi with PostgreSQL—self-hosted CMS alternative but more ops overhead compared to Sanity's cloud platform

Resources

docsSanity Client Documentation docsNestJS Official Documentation docsSanity Webhooks Guide githubBuilding Headless APIs with NestJS

Related Compatibility Guides

Django + Sanity NestJS + UploadThing NestJS + Resend NestJS + Playwright NestJS + GraphQL NestJS + Payload CMS

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