This is the official Payload Website Template. Use it to power websites, blogs, or portfolios from small to enterprise. This repo includes a fully-working backend, enterprise-grade admin panel, and a beautifully designed, production-ready website.
This template is right for you if you are working on:
- A personal or enterprise-grade website, blog, or portfolio
- A content publishing platform with a fully featured publication workflow
- A lead generation website with premium content gated behind authentication
Core features:
- Pre-configured Payload Config
- Authentication
- Access Control
- Layout Builder
- Draft Preview
- Live Preview
- Redirects
- SEO
- Website
To spin up this example locally, follow these steps:
If you have not done so already, you need to have standalone copy of this repo on your machine. If you've already cloned this repo, skip to Development.
Go to Payload Cloud and clone this template. This will create a new repository on your GitHub account with this template's code which you can then clone to your own machine.
Use the create-payload-app CLI to clone this template directly to your machine:
npx create-payload-app@beta my-project -t website
Use the git CLI to clone this template directly to your machine:
git clone -n --depth=1 --filter=tree:0 https://github.com/payloadcms/payload my-project && cd my-project && git sparse-checkout set --no-cone templates/website && git checkout && rm -rf .git && git init && git add . && git mv -f templates/website/{.,}* . && git add . && git commit -m "Initial commit"
- First clone the repo if you have not done so already
cd my-project && cp .env.example .envto copy the example environment variablespnpm install && pnpm devto install dependencies and start the dev server- open
http://localhost:3000to open the app in your browser
That's it! Changes made in ./src will be reflected in your app. Follow the on-screen instructions to login and create your first admin user. Then check out Production once you're ready to build and serve your app, and Deployment when you're ready to go live.
The Payload config is tailored specifically to the needs of most websites. It is pre-configured in the following ways:
See the Collections docs for details on how to extend this functionality.
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Users are auth-enabled collections that have access to the admin panel and unpublished content. See Access Control for more details.
For additional help, see the official Auth Example or the Authentication docs.
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Posts are used to generated blog posts, news articles, or any other type of content that is published over time. All posts are layout builder enabled so you can generate unique layouts for each post using layout-building blocks, see Layout Builder for more details. Posts are also draft-enabled so you can preview them before publishing them to your website, see Draft Preview for more details.
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All pages are layout builder enabled so you can generate unique layouts for each page using layout-building blocks, see Layout Builder for more details. Pages are also draft-enabled so you can preview them before publishing them to your website, see Draft Preview for more details.
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This is the uploads enabled collection used by pages, posts, and projects to contain media like images, videos, downloads, and other assets.
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A taxonomy used to group posts together. Categories can be nested inside of one another, for example "News > Technology". See the official Payload Nested Docs Plugin for more details.
See the Globals docs for details on how to extend this functionality.
-
HeaderThe data required by the header on your front-end like nav links.
-
FooterSame as above but for the footer of your site.
Basic access control is setup to limit access to various content based based on publishing status.
users: Users can access the admin panel and create or edit content.posts: Everyone can access published posts, but only users can create, update, or delete them.pages: Everyone can access published pages, but only users can create, update, or delete them.
For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the Payload Access Control docs.
Create unique page layouts for any type of content using a powerful layout builder. This template comes pre-configured with the following layout building blocks:
- Hero
- Content
- Media
- Call To Action
- Archive
Each block is fully designed and built into the front-end website that comes with this template. See Website for more details.
A deep editorial experience that allows complete freedom to focus just on writing content without breaking out of the flow with support for Payload blocks, media, links and other features provided out of the box. See Lexical docs.
All posts and pages are draft-enabled so you can preview them before publishing them to your website. To do this, these collections use Versions with drafts set to true. This means that when you create a new post, project, or page, it will be saved as a draft and will not be visible on your website until you publish it. This also means that you can preview your draft before publishing it to your website. To do this, we automatically format a custom URL which redirects to your front-end to securely fetch the draft version of your content.
Since the front-end of this template is statically generated, this also means that pages, posts, and projects will need to be regenerated as changes are made to published documents. To do this, we use an afterChange hook to regenerate the front-end when a document has changed and its _status is published.
For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the official Draft Preview Example.
In addition to draft previews you can also enable live preview to view your end resulting page as you're editing content with full support for SSR rendering. See Live preview docs for more details.
This template comes pre-configured with the official Payload SEO Plugin for complete SEO control from the admin panel. All SEO data is fully integrated into the front-end website that comes with this template. See Website for more details.
If you are migrating an existing site or moving content to a new URL, you can use the redirects collection to create a proper redirect from old URLs to new ones. This will ensure that proper request status codes are returned to search engines and that your users are not left with a broken link. This template comes pre-configured with the official Payload Redirects Plugin for complete redirect control from the admin panel. All redirects are fully integrated into the front-end website that comes with this template. See Website for more details.
This template includes a beautifully designed, production-ready front-end built with the Next.js App Router, served right alongside your Payload app in a instance. This makes it so that you can deploy both your backend and website where you need it.
Core features:
- Next.js App Router
- TypeScript
- React Hook Form
- Payload Admin Bar
- TailwindCSS styling
- shadcn/ui components
- Authentication
- Fully featured blog
- Publication workflow
- User accounts
- Dark mode
- Pre-made layout building blocks
- SEO
- Redirects
- Live preview
Although Next.js includes a robust set of caching strategies out of the box, Payload Cloud proxies and caches all files through Cloudflare using the Official Cloud Plugin. This means that Next.js caching is not needed and is disabled by default. If you are hosting your app outside of Payload Cloud, you can easily reenable the Next.js caching mechanisms by removing the no-store directive from all fetch requests in ./src/app/_api and then removing all instances of export const dynamic = 'force-dynamic' from pages files, such as ./src/app/(pages)/[slug]/page.tsx. For more details, see the official Next.js Caching Docs.
To spin up this example locally, follow the Quick Start. Then Seed the database with a few pages, posts, and projects.
Alternatively, you can use Docker to spin up this template locally. To do so, follow these steps:
- Follow steps 1 and 2 from above, the docker-compose file will automatically use the
.envfile in your project root - Next run
docker-compose up - Follow steps 4 and 5 from above to login and create your first admin user
That's it! The Docker instance will help you get up and running quickly while also standardizing the development environment across your teams.
To seed the database with a few pages, posts, and projects you can click the 'seed database' link from the admin panel.
The seed script will also create a demo user for demonstration purposes only:
- Demo Author
- Email:
[email protected] - Password:
password
- Email:
NOTICE: seeding the database is destructive because it drops your current database to populate a fresh one from the seed template. Only run this command if you are starting a new project or can afford to lose your current data.
To run Payload in production, you need to build and start the Admin panel. To do so, follow these steps:
- Invoke the
next buildscript by runningpnpm buildornpm run buildin your project root. This creates a.nextdirectory with a production-ready admin bundle. - Finally run
pnpm startornpm run startto run Node in production and serve Payload from the.builddirectory. - When you're ready to go live, see Deployment for more details.
The easiest way to deploy your project is to use Payload Cloud, a one-click hosting solution to deploy production-ready instances of your Payload apps directly from your GitHub repo.
Coming soon.
Before deploying your app, you need to:
- Ensure your app builds and serves in production. See Production for more details.
- Serve it from a
You can also deploy your app manually, check out the deployment documentation for full details.
If you have any issues or questions, reach out to us on Discord or start a GitHub discussion.