This example demonstrates how to achieve a multi-tenancy in Payload. This is a powerful way to vertically scale your application by sharing infrastructure across tenants.

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 demo@payloadcms.com and password demo

That's it! Changes made in ./src will be reflected in your app. See the Development section for more details on how to log in as a tenant.

How it works

A multi-tenant Payload application is a single server that hosts multiple "tenants". Examples of tenants may be your agency's clients, your business conglomerate's organizations, or your SaaS customers.

Each tenant has its own set of users, pages, and other data that is scoped to that tenant. This means that your application will be shared across tenants but the data will be scoped to each tenant. Tenants also run on separate domains entirely, so users are not aware of their tenancy.

Collections

See the Collections docs for details on how to extend any of this functionality.

Users

The users collection is auth-enabled and encompass both app-wide and tenant-scoped users based on the value of their roles and tenants fields. Users with the role super-admin can manage your entire application, while users with the tenant role of admin have limited access to the platform and can manage only the tenant(s) they are assigned to, see Tenants for more details.

For additional help with authentication, see the official Auth Example or the Authentication docs.
Tenants

A tenants collection is used to achieve tenant-based access control. Each user is assigned an array of tenants which includes a relationship to a tenant and their roles within that tenant. You can then scope any document within your application to any of your tenants using a simple relationship field on the users or pages collections, or any other collection that your application needs. The value of this field is used to filter documents in the admin panel and API to ensure that users can only access documents that belong to their tenant and are within their role. See Access Control for more details.

For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the Payload Access Control docs.
Pages

Each page is assigned a tenant which is used to control access and scope API requests. Pages that are created by tenants are automatically assigned that tenant based on that user's lastLoggedInTenant field.

Access control

Basic role-based access control is setup to determine what users can and cannot do based on their roles, which are:

super-admin: They can access the Payload admin panel to manage your multi-tenant application. They can see all tenants and make all operations.
user: They can only access the Payload admin panel if they are a tenant-admin, in which case they have a limited access to operations based on their tenant (see below).

This applies to each collection in the following ways:

users: Only super-admins, tenant-admins, and the user themselves can access their profile. Anyone can create a user, but only these admins can delete users. See Users for more details.
tenants: Only super-admins and tenant-admins can read, create, update, or delete tenants. See Tenants for more details.
pages: Everyone can access pages, but only super-admins and tenant-admins can create, update, or delete them.

When a user logs in, a lastLoggedInTenant field is saved to their profile. This is done by reading the value of req.headers.host, querying for a tenant with a matching domain, and verifying that the user is a member of that tenant. This field is then used to automatically assign the tenant to any documents that the user creates, such as pages. Super-admins can also use this field to browse the admin panel as a specific tenant.

If you have versions and drafts enabled on your pages, you will need to add additional read access control condition to check the user's tenants that prevents them from accessing draft documents of other tenants.

For more details on how to extend this functionality, see the Payload Access Control docs.

CORS

This multi-tenant setup requires an open CORS policy. Since each tenant contains a dynamic list of domains, there's no way to know specifically which domains to whitelist at runtime without significant performance implications. This also means that the serverURL is not set, as this scopes all requests to a single domain.

Alternatively, if you know the domains of your tenants ahead of time and these values won't change often, you could simply remove the domains field altogether and instead use static values.

For more details on this, see the CORS docs.

Front-end

If you're building a website or other front-end for your tenant, you will need specify the tenant in your requests. For example, if you wanted to fetch all pages for the tenant ABC, you would make a request to /api/pages?where[tenant][slug][equals]=abc.

For a head start on building a website for your tenant(s), check out the official Website Template. It includes a page layout builder, preview, SEO, and much more. It is not multi-tenant, though, but you can easily take the concepts from that example and apply them here.

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 a super-admin user with email demo@payloadcms.com and password demo along with the following tenants:

ABC
- Domains:
  - abc.localhost.com:3000
- Users:
  - admin@abc.com with role admin and password test
  - user@abc.com with role user and password test
- Pages:
  - ABC Home with content Hello, ABC!
BBC
- Domains:
  - bbc.localhost.com:3000
- Users:
  - admin@bbc.com with role admin and password test
  - user@bbc.com with role user and password test
- Pages:
  - BBC Home with content Hello, BBC!

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.

Hosts file

To fully experience the multi-tenancy of this example locally, your app must run on one of the domains listed in any of your tenant's domains field. The simplest way to do this to add the following lines to your hosts file.

# these domains were provided in the seed script
# if needed, change them based on your own tenant settings
# remember to specify the port number when browsing to these domains
127.0.0.1 abc.localhost.com
127.0.0.1 bbc.localhost.com

On Mac you can find the hosts file at /etc/hosts. On Windows, it's at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.

Then you can access your app at http://abc.localhost.com:3000 and http://bbc.localhost.com:3000. Access control will be scoped to the correct tenant based on that user's tenants, see Access Control for more details.

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.

README.md

Payload Multi-Tenant Example