Stop Building Boilerplate: 5 Node.js REST API Starters You Can Ship Today

Every new Node.js project starts the same way. You open a terminal. Create a folder. npm init . Install Express. Add CORS. Set up dotenv. Configure error handling. Write a health route to test if it works. And you've done this exact thing 10 times before. The Setup Tax I call it the setup tax — the 30-60 minutes you spend on infrastructure before writing a single line of business logic. Multiply that by every project you start in a year, and you're looking at days of lost time. I finally got tired of it and packaged 5 production-ready Node.js REST API boilerplates into a single kit. The 5 Boilerplates 1. api-basic — Minimal Express REST API The clean slate. Express + CORS + Helmet + Morgan + dotenv. Health endpoint, users route, error handler. Zero bloat. npm install cp .env.example .env npm run dev # Server running on port 3000 2. api-auth — JWT Authentication + Refresh Tokens Full auth flow: register, login, refresh token, logout. bcryptjs for password hashing, JWT for access tokens,