FastAPI Starter Template — A Comprehensive Guide [2026]

FastAPI Starter Template Production-ready FastAPI boilerplate with async SQLAlchemy, JWT auth, and Docker — ship your API in hours, not weeks. What You Get Async-first architecture — SQLAlchemy 2.0 async engine, async session management JWT authentication — Register, login, refresh tokens, role-based access control User management — Full CRUD with pagination, soft-delete, and admin routes Rate limiting — In-memory sliding window middleware (swap for Redis in production) Database migrations — Alembic with async support, auto-generate from models Docker ready — Multi-stage Dockerfile, docker-compose with PostgreSQL & Redis Test suite — AsyncClient fixtures, auth helpers, database isolation Clean project structure — Separation of concerns with dependency injection File Tree fastapi-starter-template/ ├── app/ │ ├── main.py # FastAPI app entry point │ ├── config.py # Pydantic settings from env vars │ ├── models/ │ │ ├── base.py # SQLAlchemy Base + mixins │ │ └── user.py # User model │ ├── s