TinyCore

A lightweight backend-as-a-service platform designed for hobby projects and prototypes. TinyCore provides essential backend services in a single, self-contained deployment, allowing you to focus on building your frontend without the overhead of setting up authentication, databases, and APIs.

Vision

Stop reinventing the wheel for every toy project. TinyCore gives you:

• Authentication out of the box
• Key-value storage for any data structure
• Multi-application support to run multiple projects from one backend
• Admin interface for data management
• TypeScript client with React hooks for instant frontend integration

Perfect for hackathons, MVPs, personal projects, and learning experiments.

Architecture

TinyCore is built as a monorepo with these packages:

📦 Packages

Package	Description	Purpose
@tinycore/server	Express.js backend with SQLite	REST APIs, authentication, data storage
@jbatch/tinycore-client	TypeScript client with React hooks	Frontend integration, API calls, state management
@tinycore/admin-ui	React admin interface	Data management, user-friendly CRUD operations
@tinycore/shared	Common types and utilities	Shared code across packages

Quick Start

Development

1. Clone and install:

   git clone https://github.com/jbatch/tinycore
   cd tinycore
   pnpm install

2. Start the server:

   pnpm run dev:server

3. Start the admin UI (optional):

   # In another terminal
   pnpm run dev:admin-ui

The server runs on http://localhost:3000 and admin UI on http://localhost:5173.

Production Deployment

# Build and run with Docker
pnpm run docker:build
pnpm run docker:run

Note: running docker container locally points to https://kv.jbat.ch (still need to fix this for local docker)

Access your deployment at http://localhost:3000 with the admin UI built-in.

Environment Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
PORT	3000	Server port
DB_PATH	./data/tinycore.db	SQLite database path
NODE_ENV	development	Environment mode
JWT_SECRET	your-secret-key-change-in-production	JWT signing secret
CORS_ORIGIN	*	CORS allowed origins

Development

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

# Run all packages in development
pnpm run dev:all

# Build all packages
pnpm run build

# Run database migrations
pnpm run migrate status
pnpm run migrate up

# Clean build artifacts
pnpm run clean