G12 Church Management System

People, pastoral hierarchy, DCC and Cell attendance, leadership development, and reporting for a G12 church organised into two homogeneous networks.

Status: Stage 1, foundations. The skeleton is in place and carries no features: authentication, the authorization guard, the first migration with the Section 5 constraints, and continuous integration. SKILL.md remains the contract everything is written against.

Start here

Read SKILL.md before planning or implementing anything. Where any other instruction disagrees with it, SKILL.md wins.

Layout

Commands to install, run, migrate and test are in CLAUDE.md under Running the project.

Stack

Settled in SKILL.md §2. Changing it requires a recorded decision, not a pull request.

• API — NestJS + TypeScript, REST under /api/v1, separately deployable
• Database — PostgreSQL 16, with hand-written SQL migrations and no ORM
• Web — Next.js + TypeScript as a pure client: no API routes, no server actions
• Styling — Tailwind CSS, with a palette that carries no judgement (§13)
• Mobile — Android and iOS later, against the same API

The API is the product. The web application is its first client; the phones are the next two. All three surfaces are used concurrently, so the API is stateless, token-authenticated, and detects write conflicts rather than resolving them silently.

The rules broken most often by accident

Each is stated in full in SKILL.md. This list is an index, not a substitute.

• Authorization is enforced by the API, never by a client — §7
• Capability and scope are separate grants, and both are checked on every request — §7
• An invariant that can be a database constraint must be a database constraint — §5
• Totals of people are distinct people, never summed attendance occurrences — §20
• History is effective-dated and never overwritten in place — §1, principle 12
• No judgmental wording anywhere, and never a ranking of leaders — §1, §13