Welcome to your new TanStack Start app!

Getting Started

To run this application:

npm install
npm run dev

This requires a running Postgres database — see Local development database below before your first run.

Building For Production

To build this application for production:

npm run build

Styling

This project uses Tailwind CSS for styling.

Removing Tailwind CSS

If you prefer not to use Tailwind CSS:

1. Remove the demo pages in src/routes/demo/
2. Replace the Tailwind import in src/styles.css with your own styles
3. Remove tailwindcss() from the plugins array in vite.config.ts
4. Remove @tailwindcss/vite and tailwindcss from package.json

Linting & Formatting

This project uses eslint and prettier for linting and formatting. Eslint is configured using tanstack/eslint-config. The following scripts are available:

npm run lint
npm run format
npm run check

Local development database

This project requires a Postgres database — both for its own data (Drizzle, see src/db/schema.ts) and for Better Auth's own tables (users, sessions, etc). A docker-compose.yml at the repo root starts one:

docker compose up -d           # starts Postgres on localhost:5433
cp .env.example .env.local     # sets DATABASE_URL to match
npm run db:migrate             # applies this project's Drizzle migrations
npx @better-auth/cli migrate   # applies Better Auth's own tables
npm run db:seed                # seeds a sample Brand, menu, and Machines
npm run dev

DATABASE_URL in .env.local is picked up automatically by both the dev server and the drizzle-kit commands above — no other wiring needed.

After changing src/db/schema.ts, generate and apply a new migration rather than editing the database by hand:

npm run db:generate
npm run db:migrate

Setting up Better Auth

Generate and set the BETTER_AUTH_SECRET environment variable in your .env.local:

npx -y @better-auth/cli secret

See the Better Auth documentation for more on configuring authentication.

Routing

This project uses TanStack Router with file-based routing. Routes are managed as files in src/routes.

Adding A Route

To add a new route to your application just add a new file in the ./src/routes directory.

TanStack will automatically generate the content of the route file for you.

Now that you have two routes you can use a Link component to navigate between them.

Adding Links

To use SPA (Single Page Application) navigation you will need to import the Link component from @tanstack/react-router.

import { Link } from "@tanstack/react-router";

Then anywhere in your JSX you can use it like so:

<Link to="/about">About</Link>

This will create a link that will navigate to the /about route.

More information on the Link component can be found in the Link documentation.

Using A Layout

In the File Based Routing setup the layout is located in src/routes/__root.tsx. Anything you add to the root route will appear in all the routes. The route content will appear in the JSX where you render {children} in the shellComponent.

Here is an example layout that includes a header:

import { HeadContent, Scripts, createRootRoute } from '@tanstack/react-router'

export const Route = createRootRoute({
  head: () => ({
    meta: [
      { charSet: 'utf-8' },
      { name: 'viewport', content: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1' },
      { title: 'My App' },
    ],
  }),
  shellComponent: ({ children }) => (
    <html lang="en">
      <head>
        <HeadContent />
      </head>
      <body>
        <header>
          <nav>
            <Link to="/">Home</Link>
            <Link to="/about">About</Link>
          </nav>
        </header>
        {children}
        <Scripts />
      </body>
    </html>
  ),
})

More information on layouts can be found in the Layouts documentation.

Server Functions

TanStack Start provides server functions that allow you to write server-side code that seamlessly integrates with your client components.

import { createServerFn } from '@tanstack/react-start'

const getServerTime = createServerFn({
  method: 'GET',
}).handler(async () => {
  return new Date().toISOString()
})

// Use in a component
function MyComponent() {
  const [time, setTime] = useState('')
  
  useEffect(() => {
    getServerTime().then(setTime)
  }, [])
  
  return <div>Server time: {time}</div>
}

API Routes

You can create API routes by using the server property in your route definitions:

import { createFileRoute } from '@tanstack/react-router'
import { json } from '@tanstack/react-start'

export const Route = createFileRoute('/api/hello')({
  server: {
    handlers: {
      GET: () => json({ message: 'Hello, World!' }),
    },
  },
})

Data Fetching

There are multiple ways to fetch data in your application. You can use TanStack Query to fetch data from a server. But you can also use the loader functionality built into TanStack Router to load the data for a route before it's rendered.

For example:

import { createFileRoute } from '@tanstack/react-router'

export const Route = createFileRoute('/people')({
  loader: async () => {
    const response = await fetch('https://swapi.dev/api/people')
    return response.json()
  },
  component: PeopleComponent,
})

function PeopleComponent() {
  const data = Route.useLoaderData()
  return (
    <ul>
      {data.results.map((person) => (
        <li key={person.name}>{person.name}</li>
      ))}
    </ul>
  )
}

Loaders simplify your data fetching logic dramatically. Check out more information in the Loader documentation.

Learn More

You can learn more about all of the offerings from TanStack in the TanStack documentation.

For TanStack Start specific documentation, visit TanStack Start.