Architecture

ForgeStack is a full-stack starter that gives you a complete, production-shaped system out of the box. Every request enters through a single door, Caddy, which routes traffic to whatever needs it: the frontend, the backend, your monitoring dashboards, or the database viewers.

The diagram below is the whole system at a glance. Every box can be clicked to jump to the section that explains it in depth.

The pieces

• Caddy: the reverse proxy and only public entry point. On the main domain it serves the frontend at the root and each backend service under its own path prefix (/svc1, /svc2, …); operator tools such as Grafana get their own subdomain. Covered in Deployment.
• Frontend: a Next.js application with the landing page, documentation, auth flows and a small dashboard. See Frontend.
• Backend: one or more NestJS services containing the business logic. See Backend.
• Kafka: the event bus. Services communicate by publishing and consuming events rather than calling each other directly. See Events.
• Databases: MongoDB for persistence and Redis for caching. Mongo Express is included (in dev) for inspecting the data. PostgreSQL and PGAdmin appear in the diagram dashed, tagged "soon": they are planned, not shipped yet. See Databases.
• Observability: Prometheus, Loki and Tempo collect metrics, logs and traces from every deployed component; Grafana is preconfigured to display them. See Monitoring.