payloadcms/examples/multi-tenant-single-domain/README.md

Payload Multi-Tenant Example (Single Domain)

This example demonstrates how to achieve a multi-tenancy in Payload on a single domain. Tenants are separated by a Tenants collection.

Quick Start

To spin up this example locally, follow these steps:

1. Clone this repo

2. cd into this directory and run pnpm i --ignore-workspace*, yarn, or npm install

   *If you are running using pnpm within the Payload Monorepo, the --ignore-workspace flag is needed so that pnpm generates a lockfile in this example's directory despite the fact that one exists in root.

3. pnpm dev, yarn dev or npm run dev to start the server

   • Press y when prompted to seed the database

4. open http://localhost:3000 to access the home page

5. open http://localhost:3000/admin to access the admin panel

   • Login with email demo@payloadcms.com and password demo

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.

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

The frontend is scaffolded out in this example directory. You can view the code for rendering pages at /src/app/(app)/[tenant]/[...slug]/page.tsx. This is a starter template, you may need to adjust the app to better fit your needs.

Questions

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