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What tools and boilerplates do you use to start your web apps and saas?

Surely no one is writing things like stripe integration and user authentication from scratch. How do you get started with your saas?

on April 17, 2022
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    from scratch

    I found that no boilerplates really even came close to having what I wanted—a TypeScript monorepo. E.g. sharing code across all my apps / packages, a CI / CD deploying only code that changed, and setting up all the frameworks, tests, linters, formatters, environments, and more. It took a month to build that solid foundation, and it makes coding a joy. Steep initial investment though. In the past, I’ve purchased a few templates like you described, but they didn’t fit my needs. What type of template are you looking for? Which language and framework too?

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      Thanks for the answer. I was just wondering what tooling was available out there to start a project. I sure do seem to find a lot of boilerplate templates for JavaScript

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        Yep! It just depends on what you’re looking for. I needed:

        • A typescript monorepo to organize my code across multiple apps and packages
        • A monorepo framework to cache builds so that I didn’t wait hours on deploy
        • GitHub actions to run lint, test, build, and deploy commands for per-branch deployments with notifications
        • A typescript system to bundle and build all my code
        • A custom serverless deployment to optimize build times and support NestJS
        • React support for NextJS apps and custom react libraries
        • CMS with keystone graphql api and graphql-codegen for react
        • TailwindCSS support with custom plugins, postcss, intellisense, style isolation, and more
        • Linting with eslint, stylelint, cspell, and more
        • Formatting with prettier, sort-package-json, tailwind plugins, and more
        • Automated dependency management with typesync, dependabot, npm-check-updates, and more
        • Testing with Jest, @testing-library/react, Playwright and more
        • Automatic internationalization i18n support with next-i18next, deepl translate, and VSCode plugins
        • Additional git support with husky hooks, Commitizen, commitlint, git-cz, and more
        • Benchmarks with repo-visualizer, cloc, and other statistics
        • Sharable VSCode configs with devcontainer support for quick onboarding
        • Support for ESM packages
        • Sharable configs for everything

        Anyway, that’s just scratching the surface. Your project can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. I am working on a large, long-term project and highly value the developer experience—you don’t want poor project setup to make poor project quality and code.

  2. 2

    I have my own boilerplate using Flask (python): https://github.com/nuvic/flask_for_startups