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hagopj13/node-express-boilerplate
A boilerplate for building production-ready RESTful APIs using Node.js, Express, and Mongoose
A Node/Express/MongoDB starter that wires up JWT auth, Joi validation, Winston logging, Swagger docs, and Jest tests so you don't have to. It's aimed at developers who want a sensible starting point for a REST API and don't want to make a dozen boilerplate decisions before writing their first route.
The layered architecture (controllers → services → models) is clean and forces separation of concerns from day one. The custom Mongoose plugins for pagination and JSON serialization are genuinely useful and would otherwise be copy-pasted from Stack Overflow. Test setup is solid — integration tests hit a real MongoDB instance, not mocks, and fixtures are well-organized. Token management handles both access and refresh tokens with proper rotation, which a lot of 'starter' projects get wrong.
Last commit was mid-2024 and the codebase is CommonJS with no path toward ESM — you're starting on legacy footing in 2026. CI still points at Travis CI, which has been effectively dead for open-source for years; GitHub Actions isn't configured. The refresh token implementation stores tokens in MongoDB but doesn't handle token family rotation (stolen refresh token → attacker can keep issuing access tokens until the user logs out). MongoDB/Mongoose is baked in at every layer, so if you later need Postgres or want to swap the ORM, the migration is painful.