Payload 3.0 Alpha Demo

This repo showcases a demo of Payload 3.0 running completely within Next.js.

Important

It's extremely important to note that as of now, this demo contains ALPHA software and you are 100% guaranteed to run into bugs / weird stuff.

We're actively working toward a beta release, and then a full stable release as fast as we possibly can.

Highlights

1. Payload is now Next.js-native
2. Turbopack works out of the box (this will get faster over time, expect more here)
3. The Payload admin UI is built with React Server Components and automatically eliminates server-side code from your admin bundle, completely alleviating the need to use Webpack aliases to remove hooks, access control, etc.
4. Payload is now fully-ESM across the board
5. GraphQL is now initialized only when you hit the GraphQL endpoint, and does not affect overhead of REST API routes
6. All UI components have been abstracted into a separate @payloadcms/ui package, which will be fully documented and exposed for your re-use once we hit stable 3.0 or before
7. You can run your own Next.js site alongside of Payload in the same app
8. You can now deploy Payload to Vercel, and there will be official support for Vercel Blob Storage coming soon (so no S3 needed for files)
9. Server-side HMR works out of the box, with no need for nodemon or similar. When the Payload config changes, your app will automatically re-initialize Payload seamlessly in the background
10. All custom React components can be server components by default, and you can decide if you want them to be server components or client components
11. Sharp has been abstracted to be an optional dependency
12. Payload now relies on the Web Request / Response APIs rather than the Node Request / Response
13. Express can still be used with Next.js' Custom Server functionality
14. Payload itself has slimmed down significantly and can now be fully portable, run anywhere. You can leverage the Payload Local API completely outside of Next.js if you want.
15. The data layer, including the shape of the database Payload used and the API responses in 2.0, has not been affected whatsoever

Work to come

We are making this available to our community so that we can gather your feedback and test the new approach that Payload is taking. Don't expect it to be fully functional yet. There are some things that we are aware of that are not yet completed, but we're going to keep blazing through the remaining items as fast as we can to reach stable 3.0 as quickly and efficiently as possible. Here are a few of the items that we are still working on (not a full list):

1. beforeDuplicate hooks
2. The config preview function
3. Document Duplication
4. Documentation
5. Vercel Blob Storage adapter
6. Lots of bugs for sure
7. 100% of tests passing
8. Compiler speed improvements (turbo is beta still, it is slower than it should be. it will get faster)
9. Overall speed improvements
10. Support for all official plugins
11. An install script to be able to install Payload easily into any existing Next.js app
12. A full list of breaking changes for 2.0 -> 3.0, including an in-depth migration guide

Using this repo

To try out this repo yourself, follow the steps below:

1. Clone the repo to your computer (git clone git@github.com:payloadcms/payload-3.0-alpha-demo.git)
2. cd into the new folder by running cd ./payload-3.0-alpha-demo
3. Copy the .env.example by running cp .env.example .env in the repo, then fill out the values including the connection string to your DB
4. Install dependencies with whatever package manager you use (yarn, npm install, pnpm i, etc.)
5. Fire it up (yarn dev, npm run dev, pnpm dev, etc.)
6. Visit https://localhost:3000 and log in with the user created within the config's onInit method

Follow along with breaking changes

There is a possibility that we will make breaking changes before releasing the beta, and then the full stable version of Payload 3.0.

To follow along with breaking changes in advance of the full, stable release, you can keep an eye on the CHANGELOG.md.

Technical details

The app folder

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.

The next.config.js withPayload function

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.

Using a TypeScript alias to point to your Payload config

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?

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Find a bug?

Open an issue on this repo at https://github.com/payloadcms/payload-3.0-alpha-demo with as much detail as you can provide and we will tackle them as fast as we can. Let's get stable!