Setup

This guide will walk you through setting up supastarter. We will go through the process of cloning the project, installing dependencies, setting up your database and running the local development server.

Prerequisites

Before you can get started, you will need to have the following installed on your machine.

Node.js (v20 or higher)
Git
pnpm
VSCode (recommended, or any other code editor)

Project setup

Create a new database

supastarter uses Prisma as the default ORM (database access layer). This means you can use any database supported by Prisma, including PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite. You can find all supported databases here.

Before creating a new supastarter project, make sure to have created a new database and have the connection string ready. For example when using PostgreSQL, the connection string will look something like this:

postgresql://user:password@host:port/database

Recommended database providers are Supabase, PlanetScale and Neon.

You can also find setup guides for certain providers in the supastarter blog:

Supabase

Initialize a new supastarter project

During the setup process you will be asked to provide the following information:

Project name - The name of your project
Database provider - The database provider you are using
Database connection string - The connection string of your database

To create a new supastarter project all you need to do is run the following command (replace my-awesome-project with the name of your project):

npx supastarter new my-awesome-project

This will clone and configure the supastarter repository, install all the dependencies and set up the database for you.

If you encounter any errors during the setup process, please try the manual setup instead.

First you need to clone the supastarter repository:

git clone https://github.com/supastarter/supastarter-nuxt.git

Next, we are going to install all the dependencies. Make sure you have installed pnpm before running the following command:

pnpm install

Now, we need to set up the environment variables. To do this, copy the .env.local.example file in the root of your project and rename it to .env.local.

Then open the .env.local file and set at least the DATABASE_URL:

.env.local

# Database
DATABASE_URL="YOUR_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING"

This is also the place to set the variables for your mailing provider.

Here are the necessary variables for each provider:

Plunk -> PLUNK_API_KEY
Resend -> RESEND_API_KEY
Postmark -> POSTMARK_SERVER_TOKEN
Mailgun -> MAILGUN_DOMAIN, MAILGUN_API_KEY
Nodemailer -> MAIL_HOST, MAIL_PORT, MAIL_USER, MAIL_PASS

Next, we need to link the correct providers for payments and mailing.

In the packages/mail/provider/index.ts file, set the export to the provider you want to use:

export * from "./plunk";
// or export * from './resend';
// or export * from './postmark';
// or export * from './mailgun';
// or export * from './nodemailer';

Do the same for the payment provider in the packages/payments/provider/index.ts file:

export * from "./stripe";
// or export * from './lemonsqueezy';
// or export * from './creem';
// or export * from './polar';
// or export * from './dodopayments';

Next step is to migrate your database. Make sure to check your schema in packages/database/prisma/schema.prisma before.

To push the schema to the database, run the following command:

pnpm --filter database push

Then, to generate the Prisma client, run the following command:

pnpm --filter database generate

The last step is to set the supastarter repository as the upstream origin for your project, so you can pull in updates in the future.

Run the following commands:

rm -rf .git
git init
git remote add upstream https://github.com/supastarter/supastarter-nuxt.git
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Set up your storage provider

Storage is necessary to upload and serve files like images for example for the avatars of users and organizations. supastarter supports all S3-compatible storage providers like AWS S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, Cloudflare R2, MinIO, etc.

Storage setup guide

Start your development server

Now your app should be ready to go. To start the local development server, navigate into your project root folder and run the following command.

pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser to see the SaaS app and http://localhost:3001 for the marketing site.