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 trafficnto 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. It routes each hostname to the service behind it. 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, with PostgreSQL support planned. Mongo Express is included for inspecting the data; PGAdmin will arrive with PostgreSQL. See Databases.
• Observability — Prometheus, Loki and Tempo collect metrics, logs and traces from every deployed component; Grafana is preconfigured to display them. See Monitoring.