- node - express - passport (Use cookie based auth keeping the session in your storage. I wouldn’t waste time on JWT. There’s a decent amount of complexity if you want both the security of being able to revoke access to a bad actor and the convenience of long lived sessions, and at the end the auth server will most likely need to access storage and use cookies for that anyway (eliminating the benefits of JWT). So I’d start with cookie based auth and build up complexity as needed.)
- postgres - On the Node side, I don’t recommend adding the complexity of an ORM at first (or ever). The node pg driver will give you arrays of objects back for rows. It’s convenient enough not to need the extra overhead of an ORM. - As a side note, Postgres has modules for you to implement a decent first version of a lot of things, such as search for example, before you need to reach for a dedicated solution. This makes it amazing for startups in my opinion, as you can explore ideas very quickly.
- statsd / grafana (to monitor your app and learn from the behavior of your users)
- docker-colpose.yml to make spinning up your dev environment with node / db / stats as simple as “docker-compose up”
- DigitalOcean for hosting - Use their dokku image - Set up daily backups to Spaces since your DB will be hosted here at first too
- dokku for deployment with the Postgres, letsencrypt and grafana modules - deployments are as easy as “git push master dokku”