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danielfsousa/express-rest-boilerplate
⌛️ Express starter for building RESTful APIs
Express + Mongoose boilerplate for spinning up a REST API quickly, with JWT auth, Joi validation, Passport social login, and a working user/auth resource out of the box. Aimed at developers who want a sensible starting point rather than scaffolding from scratch. Last meaningfully updated around 2021-2022 despite a 2024 README touch.
JWT + refresh token implementation is already wired up and not an afterthought — separate token model, proper expiry handling. Joi validation is applied at the route level before controllers see the request, which is the right place for it. Docker Compose configs for dev/prod/test are distinct and usable, not a single file with a comment saying 'change this for prod'. ESLint + husky + editorconfig in a boilerplate means you don't have to fight to add them later.
Still on CommonJS with no TypeScript — in 2024 this is a real gap; anyone building something production-grade will spend their first day adding types or regretting they didn't. apidoc for API documentation is effectively abandoned upstream and generates static HTML nobody maintains. Tests are integration-only with no unit test examples, which means the test suite requires a running MongoDB to get any coverage signal. Mongoose is baked in so deeply that swapping to a different database is not a refactor, it's a rewrite.