parbaked 1.3.0a3

A par-baked starter for PoC apps: signup-with-approval auth, rate limiting, and deploy scaffolding for fly.io

parbaked

A par-baked starter for FastAPI PoCs. Signup with admin approval, rate limiting, an admin dashboard, and a published off-boarding contract — set up in two commands.

If you ship PoCs on fly.io, two things eventually bite you: anyone on the internet can spin up accounts in a loop (and run up your bill), and you write the same auth boilerplate every time. parbaked is the slice between "I have an idea" and "this is safe to put online."

30-second quickstart

uv tool install parbaked --prerelease=allow --refresh
parbaked new myapp
cd myapp
parbaked dev

(See Install for the rationale behind --prerelease=allow --refresh while parbaked is on the 1.3 alpha track.)

parbaked new scaffolds the project and runs uv sync so the first parbaked dev is instant. Open http://localhost:8000/auth/admin and paste the password from the terminal banner. The admin dashboard, signup/login REST API, and rate-limit middleware are already wired. Drop more .py files in routes/ and they auto-mount.

You now have a working PoC with:

• Signup + login + JWT sessions
• Admin-approval gate (nobody gets in until you click approve)
• Built-in admin dashboard with pending/active/rejected queues
• Per-IP rate limiting (5/min signup, 10/min login by default)
• SQLite DB on a fly volume (persists across machine restarts)
• Secrets auto-generated on first run, never committed

What parbaked new scaffolds

myapp/
├── parbaked.toml          # config
├── routes/
│   └── index.py           # add more .py files, they auto-mount
├── models.py              # your SQLModel tables go here
├── pyproject.toml
├── .env.example
├── .gitignore
└── README.md

No main.py. No Dockerfile. No fly.toml. The kernel runtime owns the entrypoint; parbaked deploy generates the deploy targets from parbaked.toml. If you ever want to take ownership, parbaked eject hands you everything (see below).

Adding routes

Drop a .py file in routes/ with a module-level router:

# routes/notes.py
from fastapi import APIRouter, Depends
from parbaked import current_user

router = APIRouter()

@router.get("/")
def list_notes(user = Depends(current_user)):
    return {"user": user.email, "notes": []}

Restart the dev server (or wait for hot reload) and GET /notes/ returns your handler's response. The auto-discovery rule: file path becomes URL prefix. routes/api/users.py mounts at /api/users. routes/index.py mounts at /.

Shipping to fly.io

First-time setup — one command walks you through installing flyctl (if needed), signing in, claiming the app, pushing secrets, and deploying:

parbaked init

parbaked init generates a globally-unique fly app name from your parbaked.toml (<app-name>-<5-char-suffix> — bypasses fly's "name taken" wall on common project names), claims it under your personal org, pushes .env / auto-generated secrets via fly secrets set, then runs the first deploy. The chosen fly app name + first-deploy timestamp are cached to .parbaked/deploy.json, so subsequent redeploys are zero-prompt:

parbaked deploy

That regenerates Dockerfile + fly.toml into .parbaked/build/ from your parbaked.toml, creates the SQLite volume if it doesn't exist, and runs fly deploy against the cached app. The generated fly.toml ships with cost-protection defaults — auto_stop_machines = "stop", min_machines_running = 0, max_machines_running = 2 — so an idle deploy costs nothing and a traffic spike can't autoscale you into a bill.

Other helpers:

parbaked logs       # tail fly logs for the cached app
parbaked secrets    # push .env entries to fly secrets
parbaked tunnel     # cloudflared quick tunnel for sharing localhost
parbaked destroy    # permanently destroy the fly app (asks for confirmation)

parbaked init is for the first deploy of a given project. After that, parbaked deploy is the only one-shot you need; the rest are situational. You shouldn't need to run raw fly commands directly — if you do, file an issue.

Off-boarding contract

Every byte parbaked owns is in a public, importable format:

• Password hashes: bcrypt 2b, cost 12 — verifiable with any bcrypt-compliant library.
• Session tokens: RFC 7519 JWT, HS256 — decodable on jwt.io or any stdlib.
• Users table: documented column-by-column in docs/data-format-guarantees.md. Additive changes only between major versions.
• Audit events: one JSON object per stdout line — ships to any log aggregator.

When you outgrow parbaked, run parbaked eject. You get a parbaked-export/ directory: PostgreSQL-compatible schema.sql, CSV data dumps, the generated Dockerfile + fly.toml, an .env.example listing the env-var contract, and a MANIFEST.md pointing back at the format docs. No vendor-specific decoders. No lobster trap.

Configuration

Everything has sensible defaults. Set in parbaked.toml (non-secret) or via PARBAKED_* env vars (secrets):

Env var	Default	What it does
PARBAKED_JWT_SECRET	(auto-generated)	Session-token signing key. Required in prod.
PARBAKED_APPROVAL_TOKEN_SECRET	(auto-generated)	Magic-link signing key. Required in prod.
PARBAKED_ADMIN_PASSWORD	(auto-generated)	Dashboard login password (the form asks for a password only).
PARBAKED_ADMIN_EMAIL	unset	Where signup-approval emails go (dashboard works without this).
PARBAKED_APP_NAME	"My App"	Used in email subjects.
PARBAKED_APP_URL	http://localhost:8000	Public URL for magic links.
PARBAKED_RESEND_KEY	—	Set this to send real email via Resend. Unset → emails print to stdout. Get a free key (no card) at https://resend.com/api-keys or run parbaked email setup.
PARBAKED_MAIL_FROM	[e-mail]	From address. Default is Resend's sandbox. For real users, verify your domain at resend.com/domains.
PARBAKED_RATELIMIT_SIGNUP	5/minute	Per-IP signup limit.
PARBAKED_RATELIMIT_LOGIN	10/minute	Per-IP login limit.
PARBAKED_DATABASE_URL	sqlite:///./parbaked.db	SQLite-only. Standard SQLAlchemy URL.

Auto-generated secrets get persisted to .parbaked.json (chmod 600). In production, set them as env vars instead.

Security posture

What protects you from a bill:

• Per-IP rate limits on signup, login, and password reset (slowapi).
• No email enumeration — signup with an existing email and login with a wrong password return generic errors.
• Approval gate — even if someone gets past the rate limit, they can't do anything until you click approve.
• bcrypt for passwords, HS256 JWT for sessions, audience-scoped JWT for magic links so a session token can never be replayed as approval (and vice versa).
• CSRF double-submit cookies on every admin POST.
• Production-mode tripwires — PARBAKED_ENV=production refuses to boot if any required secret was auto-generated, warns on multi-instance setups, suppresses the admin password in the banner.

Running under a different ASGI server

parbaked dev runs uv run uvicorn parbaked.runtime:create_app --factory (pinning uvicorn + parbaked to the project's pyproject.toml / .venv rather than whatever uvicorn happens to be first on $PATH). For Gunicorn / Hypercorn / Granian, write a 2-line wsgi.py:

from parbaked.runtime import create_app
app = create_app()

Then gunicorn -k uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker wsgi:app --workers 4. See AGENTS.md for the full advanced section.

Install

The CLI is a uv tool (one-shot scaffold/dev/deploy):

uv tool install parbaked --prerelease=allow --refresh

--prerelease=allow is required while parbaked is on the 1.3 alpha track (you'll get 1.3.0a*). --refresh bypasses uv's index cache so you pick up a freshly published version immediately rather than the prior cached one. Once 1.3.0 stable ships, both flags can be dropped.

If you'd rather embed parbaked as a library dependency in an existing project:

uv add parbaked --prerelease=allow
# or
pip install --pre parbaked

Requires Python 3.11+.

Develop / contribute

git clone https://github.com/saml7n/parbaked
cd parbaked
uv sync --extra dev
uv run pytest

Issues and PRs welcome.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.