Bootstrap your secure API development with a standard GitHub NestJS template

GitHub has the concept of template repositories. This allows us to invest the time in creating a skeleton project only once and then to create GitHub repositories out of this template. In this brief post I’m sharing a GitHub template for NestJS API Backend applications.

As the rush to total digitisation compels us to write ever more APIs, it’s useful to have a template that provides the key features each of our API backends needs.

I therefore decided to invest the time and created such template, available on GitHub.

This NestJS template offers the following boilerplate capabilities:

  • A Configuration Service ready to go. This allows us to create a .env file for environment variables and have such properties available anywhere in the app.
  • A JWT service based on Passport and Auth0
  • A Permissions Guard which protects APIs with the roles contained in the JWT token passed within the request
  • A Shared Service for common functionality
  • A pagination skeleton, to handle paginated data
  • A boilerplate controller, with one open and one secure endpoint
  • A boilerplate service that the controller can invoke
  • Typeorm dependencies
  • A boilerplate Docker configuration

For details on how to build and run the application and create a Docker image if you want, please refer to the GitHub documentation.

The API security configuration is centred around Auth0, an Identity As A Service product.

If you want to know more about how to configure a NestJS API Backend with Auth0, please refer to these articles:

Setting up Auth0 for your full-stack Angular SPA

Feedback Pal Nest JS API Backend

Hope you’ll find this useful.


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