Scaffolding for a minimal TypeScript ESM / Node.js 20+ / Express 5 / Eslint 9 / Prettier project

Why?

• I'm tired of scaffolding projects from scratch and want a modern and up-to-date starting point that I can clone for new projects.
• I have not found AI to be as good at scaffolding projects as it is at generating code within an existing project.
• It's 2025, and it's time to use ESM with the latest versions of everything.

How to use

1. Install Node.js 20+ (I recommend using nvm)
2. Clone this repo
3. Add your application code to the src directory

Supported Node.js versions

I recommend using the latest LTS version of Node.js in production; however this repo runs matrix builds ensuring compatibility with the following Node.js versions (as of June 2025):

• Node.js 20 (Maintenance)
• Node.js 22 (LTS)
• Node.js 24 (Current)

Changelog

• Remove support for Node.js 18 and below due to End-of-Life (completed June 2025)
• Remove support for Node.js 23 due to End-of-Life (completed June 2025)
• Add support for Node.js 24 (Current) (completed June 2025)

Project Goals

• Require Node 20+
• Express 5
• TypeScript 5
• Support TypeScript ESM
• Use eslint for consistency
• Use Prettier for formatting
• Provide a VSCode .devcontainer
• Jest for unit tests
• (Supertest?) for API tests
• Pino for logging
• Adopt Conventional Commits and automatically generate the changelog
• Provide a GitHub Actions workflow for testing

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:

• 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