Introduction
Today I was scrolling Reddit on the bus, doomscrolling on Reddit, when I saw a post on r/FastAPI titled “The one FastAPI boilerplate to rule them all”. It was short and straight to the point: a GitHub repo with a production-ready FastAPI setup that promises to seriously cut down API dev time.
Of course, I had to check it out.
What It Is
The project is the Benav Labs FastAPI Boilerplate, and it’s genuinely one of the most complete and practical templates I’ve come across. It gives you:
- An async-first stack with FastAPI, Pydantic V2, SQLAlchemy 2.0, and PostgreSQL
- Background job queues via ARQ
- JWT auth with refresh tokens stored in cookies
- Rate limiting with tiered plans
- Redis caching (server-side + cache headers)
- Admin panel (CRUDAdmin) with session tracking
- Docker + NGINX setup for production deployment
It's a very clean and complete project.
Some testing ideas
To really see what I can do with this thing, I’ve got a few testing ideas. A content publishing API with auth, post rate limiting, Redis caching for latest content, and ARQ running background stuff like email alerts or scheduled posts would be a cool start.
Then an e-commerce microservice for testing tiered rate limits, using the admin panel for inventory, and offloading order processing to background jobs.
We could also test an analytics dashboard with heavy data coming in, PostgreSQL doing the heavy lifting, caching on both the client and server, and async jobs generating reports in the background.
Conclusion
I’d love to see WebSocket or GraphQL support added later, but for REST APIs, this template is solid. It balances speed, structure, and flexibility.
Here’s the repo if you wanna check it out:
- 👉 GitHub
- 📘 Documentation
If you try it, or you’re building something with it, drop me a message, I’m curious what others are doing with it.