Scaffolding for a minimal TypeScript Node.js Express project

Why?

• I'm tired of scaffolding projects from scratch and want a modern starting point.
• I have not found AI to be as good at scaffolding projects as it is at generating code within an existing project.
• Target the latest versions of all dependencies to maximize long-term compatibility for greenfield development.

How to use

1. Install Node.js 22+ (I recommend using nvm)
2. Clone this repo
3. Add your application code to the src directory

TODO List

• Require Node 22+
• Express 5
• TypeScript 5
• Support TypeScript ESM
• Use eslint for consistency
• Use Prettier for formatting
• VSCode devcontainer
• Jest for unit tests
• (Supertest?) for API tests
• Pino for logging

Out of Scope

• Production: This is intended to be usable in a variety of prod environments (lambda, containers, etc). As a result, Docker and/or PM2 are out of scope for now, but I would be happy to link to reference repos for how to productionize this for a variety of production environments.
• Backwards compatibility: This may work work with older versions, but I will not be investing any effort to support those.

Notes:

• Express 5 only requires Node.js 18 or higher, which is in maintenance until May 2025. To maximize long-term compatibility for greenfield projects started in 2025, this requires Node.js 22.
• tsx does not perform type checking. VS Code can do that for you locally, and your CI/CD pipeline can do that for you during builds.
• Note that tsx uses esbuild under the hood
• Express 5 was finally released in October 2024, so it may have limited community support.
• esbuild does not support emitDecoratorMetadata in tsconfig.json

References:

• https://expressjs.com/2024/10/15/v5-release.html
• https://www.trevorlasn.com/blog/whats-new-in-express-5
• The VS Code launch.json file is from https://github.com/withKonvSuu/learn-tsx
• https://esbuild.github.io/content-types/#javascript-caveats
• https://esbuild.github.io/content-types/#typescript-caveats