Drogon API platform starter

A production-oriented C++ starter for building Drogon APIs with a clear path from a minimal service to a batteries-included user/RBAC API.

Start a new service

The generator creates a fresh project in a specified empty directory:

./scripts/drogon-starter init payments-api ../payments-api --profile minimal
./scripts/drogon-starter init users-api ../users-api --profile user-service
# Equivalent explicit path form:
./scripts/drogon-starter init payments-api --path ../payments-api --profile minimal
# Upgrade a generated minimal project:
./scripts/drogon-starter enable user-service ../payments-api --force

The minimal profile provides the platform foundation. The user-service profile adds authentication, users, roles, RBAC, migrations, and tests.

Documentation

• Engineering roadmap
• Operations runbook
• OpenAPI specification
• Swagger UI source
• Repository README

Platform capabilities

• Drogon REST API with optional gRPC adapter support planned separately
• PostgreSQL migrations and seed data
• Optional Redis caching with fail-open behavior
• JWT authentication and RBAC batteries
• Liveness, readiness, metrics, structured logging, and trace propagation
• Docker Compose and hosted CI validation

Deployment packaging is intentionally left to the developer or platform team. Consumers can choose Helm, Kubernetes manifests, another orchestrator, or a managed container platform without the starter prescribing one deployment model.

Local development

Native setup scripts are available for macOS and Ubuntu 24.04. Docker builds and integration validation run in GitHub Actions, so documentation publishing does not require the C++ toolchain or service dependencies on the documentation author’s machine.

See the local development section in the README for the setup commands.