Learn a new web framework by studying a real-world app structure instead of a toy todo list.
Compare how the same blogging app is built across different backend and frontend stacks side-by-side.
Evaluate a new technology by seeing a fair, production-like reference implementation before committing to it.
Build and submit your own implementation to showcase a framework or language you want to promote.
Each framework variant requires its own runtime/package manager (Node, Python, Ruby, etc.) and Docker is needed to avoid installing all of them locally.
RealWorld is a project that gives developers a single, realistic example application, a clone of the Medium.com blogging site, and shows the same app built over and over again using many different web technologies. The project's premise is that most demo apps you find online are tiny todo lists that show a framework's surface but not how you would really structure a working application. RealWorld is the larger version: a Medium-style site with users, articles, comments, and follows that exercises authentication, database access, an API, and a fully styled front-end. The way it works is that there is a single shared API specification that every backend implementation must follow, and a single shared visual theme and set of end-to-end tests that every frontend must pass. Because every backend exposes the same API and every frontend talks to that same API, you can mix and match: a React frontend with a Django backend, an Angular frontend with a Node backend, and so on. Over one hundred community implementations have been built across different languages, libraries, and frameworks, listed on a companion site called CodebaseShow. There is also a hosted version of the backend API at api.realworld.show that anyone can plug a frontend into without setting up a server, plus a public demo at demo.realworld.show. You would use RealWorld when you want to learn a new framework by reading or writing a non-trivial example, when you want to compare how the same app is structured across different stacks, or when you are evaluating a backend or frontend technology and want a fair, like-for-like reference. The README also describes how to create and submit a new implementation.
Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.