Every new project starts the same way.

Open terminal. mkdir new-project . And then... 2 days of configuration before writing a single line of business logic.

After 8 years building APIs professionally — across startups and companies — I realized I was solving the same problems every single time:

TypeScript strict mode setup that actually works

JWT auth with refresh token rotation

A folder structure that doesn't fall apart at scale

Docker that works the same on every machine

CI/CD that doesn't take half a day to configure

So I stopped. And I packaged everything into a boilerplate I actually use in production.

What the stack looks like

After trying many combinations, this is what I landed on:

Fastify over Express — it's faster, has better TypeScript support out of the box, and the plugin system is genuinely good once you understand it.

Prisma over raw SQL or other ORMs — the DX is excellent and the generated types save hours of manual typing.

Zod for validation — schema-first validation that…