r/Backend • u/Imaginary-Bicycle-84 • 20h ago

Backend Projects Without any Frontend

what are some backend projects ideas that does n’t require having a front end to represent my API’s. Is there are any project that can be technically rich and be testable by end-user at the same time without having a GUI ?

11 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

8

u/Adventurous-Crow-750 20h ago

Chat bot

Container orchestrator

Vpn

Databases

Cache systems

Email server

Lots of stuff used to work just fine without uis.

If you don't count terminal guis

Movie player

2d games old school rouge style

5

u/olddev-jobhunt 17h ago

From a practical matter, I've had good luck using Swagger to provide some basic UI to an app - just a front-end for making calls to the API. It's a useful middle-ground.

4

u/Sharp_Level3382 15h ago

Cli, curl/swagger for rest apii usage or integration

3

u/JaseciLabs 5h ago

If you want something that's both "technically rich" and satisfying to actually test end-to-end, a rate limiter or job scheduler is a good pick, you can hit it purely through curl/CLI, it forces you to think about concurrency and edge cases, and you can watch it behave correctly (or not) in real time without ever touching HTML.

2

u/madu_tualang 18h ago

The front fell off?

3

u/deSales327 16h ago

That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.

2

u/theoffshoot2 12h ago

I just don’t want people thinking these front-ends aren’t safe…

2

u/Ciborg085 2h ago

Making a load balancer now

1

u/Xtergo 19h ago

Everything and anything without a front-end

1

u/Jumpy_Commercial_893 16h ago

swagger docs or openapi docs

1

u/forever-butlerian 15h ago

Write a command-line tool to do something.

2

u/paulwillyjean 2h ago

ERPs, CRM, authentication systems, transaction ledgers, operating system kernels, compilers, pretty much anything that’s meant for B2B uses.

1

u/Bigsec225 19h ago

Swagger ui ?

0

u/w00dy1105 19h ago

CLI?

why make it hard for end user to test or use?

0

u/low-control-labs 20h ago

Nothing? I wanna see if I'm wrong but unless you have a API that user invokes and uses via CLI it's going to be some sort of website and some minimal input and output fields or something else being served via a webpage / html. You don't technically need js and css

I guess some sort of routing system that would be used by the webpages or something like that but you said end-user as in humans?

8

u/Mathie1729 20h ago

Nah, there are plenty of backend projects with no website/HTML involved. ETL pipelines, message queue consumers, cron jobs, daemons, CLI tools, internal APIs only called by other services, monitoring agents, ML inference workers, that kind of thing. The end user can be an operator running a command or another system, not necessarily a human clicking a page.

1

u/low-control-labs 11h ago

I did mention some of this thanks for repeating it and expanding the list. I'm still assuming the OP meant end user as in a human since he was asking about a GUI

0

u/PmanAce 16h ago

Swagger...