nestjs-boilerplate VS fastify

How much time do we typically spend on project setup? We're talking about configuring installed libraries and writing boilerplate code to structure and implement best practices for achieving optimal website performance. At Brocoders, we often start new projects from scratch. That's why over 3 years ago, we created a NestJS boilerplate for the backend so that we wouldn't have to spend time developing core functionality that the end user doesn't see but is crucial for developers. Over this time, the boilerplate has received 1.9k stars on GitHub and has gained significant popularity beyond our company. Now, we've decided to take it a step further and created the Extensive React Boilerplate for the frontend. Its purpose is to keep our best practices in project development together, avoiding familiar pitfalls and reducing development time.

Our idea was to run our Brocoders Nest.js Boilerplate on Bun and see how it performs. The test was made on MacBook Pro 2GHz, 16Gb memory:

It includes all necessary features for auth (sign in, sign up, social sign up, confirm email, forgot password and roles) and file uploading (this allows one endpoint for file uploading and then attach it to any other entity). I decided to have it from the box, because all the projects we started required these features.

For example, Fastify removed the instanceof operatorfrom its codebase because it was causing problems for those developers that rely on jest as a testing framework.

Both are frameworks but NextJs is for Forntend (web app in browser that use ReactJs under the hood) and NestJs is for Backend (server app running on a server witch use Express or Fastify). The only thing similar between them is the typed language in which they were written.

Restify & Fastify Hapi

Let's create a sample Node API project we can work with throughout to build a new docker image. We will leverage Fastify to create an API that we configure via the fastify-cli.

Fastify

In setting out to build this service, we wanted to use gRPC for its APIs. We’ve been reaching for REST when building APIs so far, primarily out of necessity, i.e., our public APIs needed auto-generated client SDKs and docs for developers working with them. We built those APIs with Fastify and Typebox but felt burned by a code-first approach to generating an OpenAPI spec. I’ll spare you the details and save that experience/learning for another article. Suffice it to say we love gRPC’s schema-first approach. This blog post summarizes our feelings well

Fastify – Fast and Low overhead web framework

Custom Functions are powered by Fastify (a light-weight Node.js framework that claims to be faster than Express.js), so they’re extremely flexible.