You'll see that Payload requires a few files to be present in your `/app` folder. There are files for the admin UI as well as files for all route handlers. We've consolidated all admin views into a single `page.tsx` and consolidated most of the REST endpoints into a single `route.ts` file for simplicity, but also for development performance. With this pattern, you only have to compile the admin UI / REST API / GraphQL API a single time - and from there, it will be lightning-fast.
You'll see in the Next.js config that we have a `withPayload` function installed. This function is required for Payload to operate, and it ensures compatibility with packages that Payload needs such as `drizzle-kit`, `sharp`, `pino`, and `mongodb`.
In the `tsconfig.json` within this repo, you'll see that we have `paths` set up to point `@payload-config` to the Payload config, which is located in the root. You can put your config wherever you want. By default, the `page.tsx` files and `route.ts` files within the `/app` folder use this alias. In the future, we might make it optional to use `paths` - and by default, we might just hard-code relative path imports to the config. We would like to hear your feedback on this part. What do you prefer? Use `paths` or just use relative imports?
