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 way, 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 a 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 live in the packages/api package. Inside, the modules folder contains the API's feature modules. Each module has its own directory and exports its resolvers.

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

By default, the API is integrated with the web app and exposed as a Next.js route handler:

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

import { handle } from "hono/vercel";

import { appRouter } from "@workspace/api";

const handler = handle(appRouter);
export {
  handler as GET,
  handler as POST,
  handler as OPTIONS,
  handler as PUT,
  handler as PATCH,
  handler as DELETE,
  handler as HEAD,
};

API availability

As the API is a separate service, it must be deployed to use it in other apps (e.g. mobile app or browser extension), even if you don't need the web app itself.

By default, it's hosted together with the web app, so you don't need to worry about it separately. However, you can also deploy it as a standalone service.

Observability

To give you some visibility into how the API is performing in production, and to track its usage and performance metrics, we integrated a basic status monitor, which is available at the /api/status route.

API status monitor

You can use it to check if the API is running and to get basic metrics like:

uptime
response time
recent errors
CPU and memory usage
event loop lag
server info
route analytics
p50, p95, and p99 latency

Feel free to extend it with your own metrics and monitoring tools.

To learn more about the API, check the following sections:

Adding new endpoint

How to add new endpoint to the API.

Protected routes

Learn how to protect your API routes.

Using API client

How to use API client to interact with the API.

Mutations

Learn how to mutate data on the server.

Internationalization

Learn how to localize and translate your API.