I created this to save myself the time of having to spend hours initializing and configuring a project every time I have an idea since this is already a pretty good starting point.

Setup

Setting up the application will consist of the following:

Install MySQL/MariaDB server
Create a new database for the application
Create a new user with full access to the database
Configure environment file with database connection information and other optional changes
Installing node packages
Running application

Database Setup

This project was created using MariaDB and uses @prisma/adapter-mariadb. While MariaDB is compliant with MySQL and will probably have no issues working with MySQL, it is highly advised you use MariaDB for your database.

Once your database server is installed, you can run the following commands:

-- Create the database
CREATE DATABASE `foobar`
    CHARACTER SET utf8mb4
    COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
 
-- Create the user (pls do not use the default password)
CREATE USER 'foo'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';
-- if you prefer a more locked down account that can only connect locally:
--CREATE USER 'foo'@'192.168.%' IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';
 
-- Grant all privileges on the recipes database
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `foobar`.* TO 'foo'@'%';
 
-- Apply the privilege changes
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

The names of the database and account are not important, nor is the host value for the account. Feel free to configure the database name, user name, and host. If you decide to do so, please remember to use the updated values later in the config.

Configuring Environment File

Once you've confirmed your database is fully configured and you can connect using the newly created account, you will need to populate the .env config file. You may rename the .env.example file to .env to have all required values pre-populated in the config.

The only required values to be updated are the keys prefixed with DB_, as these values are used to build the database connection string, and all the values under the # Security settings comment. For the SESSION_SECRET value, it is advised you generate a cryptographically random string of at least 32 characters.

# Application settings
APP_PORT=8080
# Environments - dev, prod
APP_ENVIRONMENT=prod

# Database settings
DB_HOST=<server IP>
DB_PORT=3306
DB_NAME=foobar
DB_USER=foo
DB_PASS=<PASSWORD>

# Security settings
SESSION_SECRET=a2VwdG9mZmljaWFsYXJyYW5nZW1lbnRpbmRlcGVuZGVudGxha2VjbGVhcmx5b2xkZXJibG9vZHRpcHNwZWVjaA==

If for whatever reason you need to override the default format of mysql://user:password@host:port/name for your database connection string, you my optionally include a DB_URL=... value in the config to override how the connection string is generated, which will ignore all other DB_* values and use your exact inputted value.

Running Application

Once the .env file has been configured, you may now run the application. This application was developed with Node.js v25.9.0 and npm v11.12.1. Please see Node.js's download page for installation.

If/when you have Node.js installed, open a shell in the root of this project and run the following commands:

# Install Node.js packages
npm i

# Deploy database using provided connection information
npm run db:deploy

# Seed database with required data
npm run db:seed

# Run application
npm start

If successful, you will see the IP of the server in the console output.