Scaffold a backend you can ship in one command

I got tired of cloning the same serverless backend and deleting half of it. The leftover folders never matched the next app. Auth was wired for a product I was not building. The database was the one I used last time, not this time.

create-devboy-app is the scaffolder I wanted instead. It generates an API only. There is no leftover Next.js app to gut. Configuration happens in a local UI via devboy studio.

npx create-devboy-app my-api

Pass a name as the first argument, or let it prompt.

What it asks

Four choices. Skip what you do not need.

• Compute — AWS. This is the runtime you deploy.
• Auth — Clerk, or none.
• Database — Neon, MongoDB Atlas, or none.
• Cron — QStash, or none.

That is the whole product surface. You are not inheriting a kitchen-sink template. You are picking the pieces this API actually uses.

After create

cd my-api
cp .env.local.example .env.local
npm run studio    # local dashboard
npm start         # local API
npm run deploy    # public AWS URL for your other apps

Fill in .env.local from the example. Studio is the dashboard for configuring the API on your machine. npm start runs the API locally so you can hit it from whatever frontend you already have.

npm run deploy publishes a public AWS URL. Other apps talk to that URL. They do not talk to Studio.

Studio stays on your machine. The API is what you deploy.

Local vs public

This split is the point.

Studio is for you: inspect config, wire env, poke at the API without putting a dashboard on the internet.

The API is for everything else: your web app, a widget, another service. Once it is deployed, those clients use the public URL. You can keep iterating locally with npm start the same way.

Why two packages

create-devboy-app is the generator. devboy-cli is the runtime.

Keeping them split means the scaffolder can change prompts without dragging the SDK. The SDK can ship without a copy of the template. If the generator gets a new question next month, your already-created APIs do not care.

When to use it

Use it when you want a backend that is boring in the good way: pick compute, pick auth, pick a database, deploy.

Skip it if you want a full-stack starter with pages, auth screens, and a marketing site in the same repo. This package does not generate that. It generates the API those apps can call.

Start here: github.com/mdzyaan/create-devboy-app.