I stopped setting up TypeScript APIs from scratch — here's what I do instead

Every new project starts the same way. Open terminal. mkdir new-project. And then... 2 days of configuration before writing a single line of business logic. After 8 years building APIs professionally — across startups and companies — I realized I was solving the same problems every single time: TypeScript strict mode setup that actually works JWT auth with refresh token rotation A folder structure that doesn't fall apart at scale Docker that works the same on every machine CI/CD that doesn't take half a day to configure So I stopped. And I packaged everything into a boilerplate I actually use in production. What the stack looks like After trying many combinations, this is what I landed on: Fastify over Express — it's faster, has better TypeScript support out of the box, and the plugin system is genuinely good once you understand it. Prisma over raw SQL or other ORMs — the DX is excellent and the generated types save hours of manual typing. Zod for validation — schema-first validation t