In my 10 years of building APIs, I've found that Fastify offers the best balance of performance and developer experience. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through building a production-ready REST API from scratch.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have Node.js 20+ and npm installed. We'll also need PostgreSQL running locally or via Docker.

Step 1: Project Setup

First, create a new directory and initialize the project with TypeScript support.

mkdir my-api && cd my-api
npm init -y
npm install fastify @fastify/cors zod
npm install -D typescript tsx @types/node

Step 2: Configure TypeScript

Create a strict TypeScript configuration that enforces type safety.

Step 3: Create the Server

Set up the Fastify server with proper error handling and logging.

Step 4: Add Routes with Validation

Use Zod schemas to validate all incoming requests automatically.

Step 5: Connect the Database

Integrate Prisma ORM for type-safe database queries.

Conclusion

You now have a fully functional, type-safe REST API. For more advanced patterns, check out our guides on authentication and rate limiting.