StartKit

A sane starting point for Next.js projects on the edge.

Features

• Edge-driven development. 100% on the edge by default, but easy to move off when needed.
• Next.js 14 with the /app directory and API Route Handlers.
• Bun as a package manager!
• React Server Components by default.
• Drizzle database ORM, configured for PostgreSQL and Drizzle Kit
• Insanely fast linting and formatting via Biome for readable, safe code.
• Contentlayer for Markdown content (using the active fork)
• Typescript for a rock-solid codebase
• TailwindCSS for utility-first CSS.
• Gorgeous UI built with Radix and shadcn/ui.
• Authentication via Next Auth version 5.
• Email via Postmark and jsx-email.
• The beautiful Geist typeface.
• Next Metadata API for SEO handling, with file-system handlers.
• Vitest testing, optimized for Next.js
• Dark Mode support (without bypassing Server Components).
• Sane VSCode settings and recommended extensions.

Starting a new project with StartKit

1. Clone this repo to your desired path:

   git clone git@github.com:startkit-dev/next.git my-new-project

2. Initialize the project:

   ./bin/rename

   This will rename startkit to your project name throughout the app, update your git remote to be named startkit, install the .env file, and install all of your dependencies.

   In the future, you'll be able to pull in the latest StartKit changes without missing a beat by running:

   git fetch startkit
   git merge startkit/main

   Once you run ./bin/rename, it will be safe to delete. You can also delete this section of the README.

Getting Started

When you first check out a this project, you should run the following command to get your environment all set up:

bun run setup

Environment variables

Environment variables are stored in .env files. By default the .env file is included in source control and contains settings and defaults to get the app running. Any secrets or local overrides of these values should be placed in a .env.local file, which is ignored from source control.

For environment-specific environment variables, you can place the defaults in .env.development, and overwrite locally with .env.development.local.

You can read more about environment variables here.

Running the server

bun run dev

The app will be running at http://localhost:3000.

Edge by default 🚀

The guiding priciple of this app is that everything should run on the edge by default. In some scenarios, we may need to run code in a nodejs runtime, but those are exceptions, not the rule.

All routes in the app are currently running on the edge runtime. This includes authentication routes which talk to our database, as well as our email-rendering logic. This has one major limitation: currently the database also can not be run locally, as our edge adapter requires it to communicate via HTTP. We feel that this limitation is acceptable to allow for cleaner code, and to allow apps to run smoothly on the edge.

Database

Drizzle is set up to use serverless PostgreSQL by default (via Neon), but any database will work. Simply set DATABASE_URL in your .env (or .env.local) file to work.

You should set DATABASE_URL and/or DATABASE_URL_POOLED to your Neon branch URL.

NOTE: The code is currently set up to connect to the database using Neon's serverless package. If you would like to run a local database, you can find instructions for connecting as if it were serverless here.

bun run db

This project exposes a package.json script for accessing drizzle-kit via bun run db <command>. This script handles all environment variable mapping automatically via dotenv-cli, so you don't have to think about it. You should always try to use this script when interacting with drizzle-kit locally.

Making changes to the database schema

Make changes to your database by modifying lib/db/schema.ts (learn more).

When prototyping changes, you can use db push:

bun run db push:pg

When you feel comfortable with the changes, you can make a migration file by running:

bun run db generate:pg

Browsing the database

Drizzle offers a simple UI for inspecting the database. To launch it, run:

bun run db studio

Email

Email is configured to send via the amazing Postmark email service, and uses the wonderful jsx-email library.

Email templates live with your react code and are defined in ./emails.

To view live previews of your email templates, you can run:

bun run dev:email

And you will be able to visit http://localhost:3001 to edit your emails with live reload.

UI components

By default, this project includes the following components from shadcn/ui:

• Button
• Toast

To add new UI components from shadcn/ui, run:

pnpx shadcn-ui@latest add button

where button can be any UI element from the project.

Linting / Checking the codebase

To run a full check of the codebase (type-check, lint, format check, test), run:

bun run check

Linting

bun run lint

Type Checking

bun run type-check

Formatting with Biome

bun run format

to check for format errors, run:

bun run format:check

Testing via Vitest

bun run test

Patching Packages

Occasionally you need to patch a dependency. In general, you can use patch-package, but it does not yet have bun support (See the open PR). To patch a package, you should do he following:

1. Run bun install --yarn which will create a yarn.lock file (this will be temporary for us).
2. Modify the packages you need to patch within node_modules.
3. Run bunx patch-package <package-name>
4. Remove the yarn.lock file (rm yarn.lock)

Now your packages will be patched like normal.

❤️ Open Source

This project is MIT-licensed and is free to use and modify for your own projects.

It was created by Matt Venables.