Why

Have you recently started a new Node.js API project? Did you use some template or started the project from scratch?
I was asking the same questions myself and I was looking for minimal boilerplate for a while. There were so many options that it was hard to pick one.
Most of them are using Express.js, others are using ES5 or lack test setup.
So I decided to spin one on my own and reuse it in the future. Here is the repo at GitHub.

How

My setup has the following characteristics:

API

• Node version 10 or later
• TypeScript for obvious reasons
• Fastify for its asynchronous nature and being faster than Express or Restify
• Nodemon in development for watching for changes and restart the server

Data

• MongoDB with Mongoose
• Docker for MongoDB service

Tests

• Jest for being the de facto in Node testing
• In memory Mongod server for easily mock the DB
• Coverall for coverage collector after Jest report is generated

Code formatting and static analysis

• ESLint config
• Prettier config attached to the linter
• Editor config

Documentation

• Swagger UI for API documentation
• Postman collections attached from testing the endpoints

CI

• Continuous integration in Travis CI. Steps:

1. Install dependencies
2. Run tests
3. Collect coverage and pass it to Coverall

And thats it! I hope it's minimal enough.
Please share some ideas for improvement. I thought of API versioning but Fastify seems to support that out of the box.
API key authentication was also something I was considering, but there were so many available options of implementations. If you have something in mind would love to discuss it in the comments.
Happy coding!