// the find
mugnavo/cove
The Cove Stack: 🏝️ minimal TanStack Start template with Vite+, Better Auth, Drizzle ORM, shadcn/ui
A TanStack Start boilerplate wiring together Better Auth, Drizzle/Postgres, shadcn/ui, and Vite Plus/Nitro into a working login-and-dashboard skeleton. It's aimed at people who want to skip the auth+DB+UI glue work and start a SaaS-shaped app, not at people looking for a production-hardened framework.
The auth middleware and Better Auth wiring are a real time-saver — session handling and protected server functions are already correct, which is the part most people get wrong on their own. It ships actual tests (Vitest + Playwright) instead of the usual zero-test starter, and clearly marks them as optional scaffolding to delete. The 'DELETE_ME' naming convention on throwaway example files is a good touch — it's obvious what to rip out versus what's load-bearing.
It's built on a stack of pre-1.0 software: TanStack Start is RC, Nitro v3 is beta, Drizzle v1 relations are RC, TanStack Devtools is alpha. The README's own issue-watchlist section is basically an admission that breaking changes are coming, which is a bad foundation for anything beyond a prototype. It also pulls in several niche, maintainer-preferred tools (Vite Plus instead of plain Vite, Varlock for env vars, evlog for logging) that aren't widely adopted — adopting this template means adopting that whole opinionated toolchain, not just TanStack Start plus auth. Beyond login/signup there's no real example feature (no CRUD, no data table, no file upload) showing how the pieces compose under load. Requiring Node >=24 also cuts out anyone still on an LTS line.