tda-website

Public website for Tillotson Design Associates (tillotsondesign.com). Payload CMS 3 inside Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Postgres, pnpm.

Start with CLAUDE.md and .claude/skills/tda-website/SKILL.md. Stack decisions and the questions TDA still has to answer are in docs/decisions.md.

Local setup

Requires Node 20.18+ (22 recommended), pnpm 10, and Postgres 16.

1. cp .env.example .env and set PAYLOAD_SECRET (openssl rand -hex 32).
2. Start Postgres. Either docker compose up -d postgres, or use a local install with a tda user and tda_website database matching DATABASE_URL.
3. pnpm install
4. pnpm payload migrate to create the tables.
5. pnpm dev, then open http://localhost:3000/admin and create the first admin user.

Schema changes

Push mode is off, in development too, so the database only changes through committed migrations. After editing a collection or global:

1. pnpm payload generate:types
2. pnpm payload migrate:create
3. Check the new migration’s down function. Payload 3.91 generates DROP TABLE ... CASCADE followed by DROP CONSTRAINT / DROP INDEX on objects the cascade already removed, so the rollback fails. Add IF EXISTS to those statements.
4. pnpm payload migrate, then pnpm payload migrate:down and pnpm payload migrate again to prove the rollback works.
5. Commit the collection change, src/payload-types.ts and the new files in src/migrations/ together.

Production runs payload migrate once per deploy, at build time (vercel.json). Preview deployments skip it so a branch can never change the production database before it is merged.

Checks

• pnpm exec tsc --noEmit
• pnpm lint
• pnpm build
• pnpm test:int (needs the database running)
• pnpm test:e2e (starts pnpm dev itself if nothing is on port 3000)