This example demonstrates how to serve your front-end alongside Payload in a single Express server. This pattern will cut down on hosting costs and can simplify your deployment process.

Quick Start

To spin up this example locally, follow these steps:

First clone the repo
Then cd YOUR_PROJECT_REPO && cp .env.example .env
Next yarn && yarn dev
Now open http://localhost:3000/admin to access the admin panel
Login with email dev@payloadcms.com and password test

That's it! Changes made in ./src will be reflected in your app. See the Development section for more details.

How it works

When you use Payload, you plug it into your Express server. That's a fundamental difference between Payload and other application frameworks. It means that when you use Payload, you're technically adding Payload to your app, and not building a "Payload app".

One of the strengths of this pattern is that it lets you do powerful things like integrate your Payload instance directly with your front-end. This will allow you to host Payload alongside a fully dynamic, CMS-integrated website or app on a single, combined server—while still getting all of the benefits of a headless CMS.

Express

In every Payload app is a server.ts file in which you instantiate your own Express server and attach Payload to it. This is where you can can add any custom Express middleware or routes you need to serve your front-end. To combine Payload with your framework on the same server, we need to do three main things:

Modify your server.ts file to build and serve your front-end using the APIs provided by your framework
Modify your package.json scripts include your framework's build commands
Use a separate tsconfig.server.json file to build the server, because your front-end may require incompatible TypeScript settings

This example demonstrates how to do this with Next.js, although the same principles apply to any front-end framework like Vue, Nuxt, or SvelteKit. If your framework does not yet have instructions listed here, please consider contributing them to this example for others to use. To quickly eject Next.js from this example, see the Eject section.

Next.js

For Next.js apps, your server.ts file looks something like this:

import next from 'next'
import nextBuild from 'next/dist/build'

// Instantiate Express and Payload
// ...

// If building, start the server to build the Next.js app then exit
if (process.env.NEXT_BUILD) {
  app.listen(3000, async () => {
    await nextBuild(path.join(__dirname, '../'))
    process.exit()
  })

  return
}

// Attach Next.js routes and start the server
const nextApp = next({
  dev: process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production',
})

const nextHandler = nextApp.getRequestHandler()

app.get('*', (req, res) => nextHandler(req, res))

nextApp.prepare().then(() => {
  app.listen(3000)
})

Check out the server.ts in this repository for a complete working example. You can also see the Next.js docs for more details.

Then your package.json might look something like this:

// ...
"scripts": {
  // ...
  "build:payload": "payload build",
  "build:server": "tsc --project tsconfig.server.json",
  "build:next": "next build",
  "build": "yarn build:payload && yarn build:server && yarn build:next",
}

Check out the package.json in this repository for a complete working example. You can also see the Next.js docs for more details.

Eject

To eject Next.js from this template and replace it with another front-end framework, follow these steps:

Remove the next, react, and react-dom dependencies from your package.json file
Remove the next.config.js and next-env.d.ts files from your project root
Remove the ./src/app directory and all of its contents

Now you can install and setup any other framework you'd like. Follow the Express instructions above to make the necessary changes to build and serve your front-end.

Development

To spin up this example locally, follow the Quick Start.

Seed

On boot, a seed script is included to scaffold a basic database for you to use as an example. This is done by setting the PAYLOAD_DROP_DATABASE and PAYLOAD_SEED environment variables which are included in the .env.example by default. You can remove these from your .env to prevent this behavior. You can also freshly seed your project at any time by running yarn seed. This seed creates an admin user with email dev@payloadcms.com, password test, and a home page.

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.

Production

To run Payload in production, you need to build and serve the Admin panel. To do so, follow these steps:

First, invoke the payload build script by running yarn build or npm run build in your project root. This creates a ./build directory with a production-ready admin bundle.
Then, run yarn serve or npm run serve to run Node in production and serve Payload from the ./build directory.

Deployment

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. You can also choose to self-host your app, check out the Deployment docs for more details.

Questions

If you have any issues or questions, reach out to us on Discord or start a GitHub discussion.