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sysgears/apollo-universal-starter-kit

★ 1,678 · JavaScript · MIT · updated Dec 2023

Apollo Universal Starter Kit is a SEO-friendly, fully-configured, modular starter application that helps developers to streamline web, server, and mobile development with cutting-edge technologies and ultimate code reuse.

A full-stack JavaScript starter kit combining Apollo GraphQL, React, React Native, and optionally Angular or Scala, targeting developers who want a single codebase spanning web, server, and mobile. It ships with auth, payments, i18n, chat, and a fractal module system out of the box. Last commit was December 2023 and the project shows clear signs of maintenance slowdown.

The fractal module architecture is the real idea here — each feature lives in its own directory with client, server, and mobile implementations side by side, and you can delete any module without breaking the rest. The CLI for removing unwanted stacks is genuinely useful; most starter kits force you to manually untangle dependencies. Social auth (GitHub, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn), JWT, session auth, and Stripe subscriptions are all pre-wired and tested. The scope of cross-platform code reuse — sharing GraphQL queries and TypeScript types between React web, React Native, and Node — is more than most starter kits attempt.

It's effectively unmaintained at this point: last push December 2023, Apollo v2/v3 internals, Knex instead of a modern ORM, and Expo SDK versions that are probably multiple major versions behind. Adopting this means immediately inheriting a large debt of dependency updates before writing a line of your own code. The Scala server option sounds interesting until you realize it's a separate build system (SBT) with partial feature parity — you get some modules implemented in Scala and others only in TypeScript, with no clear path to which is authoritative. The repo surface area is enormous for what it provides: six frontend targets, two server runtimes, a custom module CLI, and three UI frameworks, which makes it hard to understand what's actually load-bearing versus aspirational.

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