// the find
realworld-apps/realworld
"The mother of all demo apps" — Exemplary fullstack Medium.com clone powered by React, Angular, Node, Django, and many more
This isn't an app itself — it's a shared spec (API contract, CSS theme, E2E tests) that over 100 separate repos implement as 'Conduit', a Medium clone, so you can compare the same real app written in React, Angular, Django, Rails, and dozens of other stacks side by side. It's aimed at developers evaluating a new framework who want to see how it handles auth, pagination, and CRUD beyond a todo-list demo.
The API spec is enforced, not just documented — backends run against a real Bruno/Hurl test suite covering auth, articles, comments, favorites, and feed pagination, including edge cases like empty-string vs null field updates. A shared CSS theme means frontend implementations are visually identical, so the only variable between implementations is the framework code itself. There's a hosted demo (api.realworld.show + demo.realworld.show) you can hit without cloning or running anything locally.
The actual code you'd read lives in 100+ external repos maintained by different people at wildly different quality and freshness levels — this repo just points at them, so 'spec-compliant' doesn't mean 'well-written' or 'current'. Only two backends are called out as fully spec-compliant in the README despite the claimed 100+ implementations, which suggests conformance has drifted for the rest. The app domain (a blog CRUD clone) is intentionally simple, so it never forces an implementation to deal with the messier problems — background jobs, complex authorization, real-time updates — that actually differentiate frameworks in production.