How I Ship a Production NestJS Backend in Under 30 Minutes

Every new project used to take me 2-3 days of setup before I wrote a single line of business logic.

Auth. i18n. MongoDB. Redis. Docker. Swagger. Tests. Every. Single. Time.

Here's the stack I landed on after 6 projects:

The Setup

1. One command to run everything

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  app:
    build: .
    ports: ["3000:3000"]
  mongo:
    image: mongo:7
    ports: ["27017:27017"]
  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    ports: ["6379:6379"]

docker compose up -d

3 services. Zero config drift between my machine and production.

2. Auth that doesn't leak

JWT access tokens (15min) + refresh tokens (7 days, hashed in DB). Logout invalidates both — refresh token deleted from DB, access token blacklisted in Redis. No dangling sessions.

3. i18n from day one

Vietnamese users deserve proper tone marks. Two JSON files, one auto-detect from Accept-Language, one translation function. Not a 500KB library. Just ~50 lines.

{ "email_invalid": "Email không hợp lệ" }
{ "email_invalid": "Invalid email address" }

4. Validation that actually validates

ValidationPipe({ whitelist: true, forbidNonWhitelisted: true }) — one line. No more unexpected fields in your DTOs. If your API crashes in dev, it crashes the same way in prod.