Frequently Asked Questions

Ship Stuff Faster is a free, open-source project scaffold meant as a clean starting point for new web applications. It doesn't include Celery, Redis, or the other defaults most 'scaffolds' bundle - you don't need them yet. Get customers first.

Me and developers like me. The first weeks of a project aren't fun. They're boilerplate. Skip wiring up auth, DRF boilerplate, and a frontend build. Get straight to building the actual product.

It's working software. The auth flow is implemented end to end, the DRF patterns are real code you can extend rather than commented-out examples, and the test suite (pytest + Hypothesis) runs against actual behavior.

Git, Python with Poetry for the API side, and Node.js with npm for the frontend. No database server, Docker daemon, or additional tooling is required to get the scaffold running locally.

JWT auth with access and refresh tokens, stored in httpOnly cookies rather than local storage or JavaScript-readable cookies. A Next.js proxy route sits between the browser and the API - it attaches auth headers to outgoing requests, transparently refreshes an expired access token, and retries the original request. Your frontend code calling the API doesn't need to know any of this is happening.

Base DRF viewset, serializer, pagination, and permission classes are already wired together in a consistent pattern. Adding a new resource means extending these base classes rather than writing the plumbing from scratch each time.

JobLock is a model included in the scaffold for preventing duplicate execution of a background job - useful anywhere you need to guarantee a job runs once even if it gets triggered more than once (a retried request, a duplicate scheduled trigger, and so on). It's a plain Django model, so it works regardless of what you use to actually run jobs - the scaffold doesn't assume Celery or any other specific task runner.

A shadcn/ui + Tailwind 4 component scaffold, so you have a working design system and accessible base components instead of starting from a blank stylesheet.

Provide the environment variable.

Confirm Poetry itself is installed and on your PATH (poetry --version). If Poetry is present but dependency resolution fails, check that your Python version matches what the scaffold expects.

This is almost always the Next.js proxy route not being hit. Double check requests from the frontend are going through the proxy route rather than directly to the API, since the proxy is what attaches the auth cookie as a header and handles token refresh.

Confirm your Node.js version is current enough for Next.js 15 and React 19.