Services
In this document, you'll learn about what Services are in Medusa.
What are Services
Services in Medusa represent bundled helper methods that you want to use across your commerce application. By convention, they represent a certain entity or functionality in Medusa.
For example, you can use Medusa’s productService to get the list of products, as well as perform other functionalities related to products. There’s also an authService that provides functionalities like authenticating customers and users.
In the Medusa backend, custom services are TypeScript or JavaScript files located in the src/services directory. Each service should be a class that extends the TransactionBaseService class from the core Medusa package @medusajs/medusa. Each file you create in src/services should hold one service and export it.
The file name is important as it determines the name of the service when you need to use it elsewhere. The name of the service will be registered in the dependency container as the camel-case version of the file name with Service appended to the end of the name. Other resources, such as other services or endpoints, will use that name when resolving the service from the dependency container.
For example, if the file name is hello.ts, the service will be registered as helloService in the dependency container. If the file name is hello-world.ts, the service name will be registered as helloWorldService.
You can learn more about the dependency container and how it works in the dependency injection documentation.
The service must then be transpiled using the build command, which moves them to the dist directory, to be used across your commerce application.
If you're creating a service in a plugin, learn more about the required structure here.
Custom Development
Developers can create custom services in the Medusa backend, a plugin, or in a module.
Learn how to create a service in Medusa.
Learn how to extend a core Medusa service.