Overview

TurboStarter is designed to be a scalable and production-ready full-stack starter kit. One of its core features is a dedicated and extensible API layer. To enable this in a type-safe manner, we chose Hono as the API server and client library.

Why Hono?

Hono is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework that gives you a way to define your API endpoints with full type safety. It provides built-in middleware for common needs like validation, caching, and CORS. It also includes an RPC client for making type-safe function calls from the frontend. Being edge-first, it's optimized for serverless environments and offers excellent performance.

All API endpoints and their resolvers are defined in the packages/api/ package. Here you will find a modules folder that contains the different feature modules of the API. Each module has its own folder and exports all its resolvers.

For each module, we create a separate Hono route in the packages/api/index.ts file and aggregate all sub-routers into one main router.

The API is then exposed as a route handler that will be provided as a Next.js API route:

apps/web/src/app/api/[...route]/route.ts

import { handle } from "hono/vercel";
 
import { appRouter } from "@turbostarter/api";
 
const handler = handle(appRouter);
export { handler as GET, handler as POST };

API availability

The API is a part of web, serverless Next.js app. It means that you must deploy it to use the API in other apps (e.g. mobile app, browser extension), even if you don't need web app itself. It's very simple, as you're just deploying the Next.js app and the API is just a part of it.

Learn more about API in the following sections:

Adding new endpoint

Protected routes

Using API client

Mutations

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