MakerKit is built primarily with Next.js, Firebase, and Tailwind CSS.
Under the hood, there are many more libraries and architectural decisions you should know.
1) A Scalable Next.js Application
The codebase is entirely built with Next.js (version 13), a popular React meta-framework created by the fine folks at Vercel.
The front end is fully built with React, leveraging React Hooks and the best practices available today.
The boilerplate is currently using the pages folder structure.
2) Built on top of Firebase
Firebase is one of the most popular PaaS out there, with a very generous free tier and fairly affordable pricing for growing applications.
MakerKit uses Firebase for Authentication, Firestore for storing your data, Storage for storing files, and AppCheck to protect your endpoints against possible attacks.
3) Theme built with Tailwind CSS
The bulk of the application's theme, built with Tailwind 3, is stored in three CSS files rather than HTML.
It may sound like a bad practice, but we approached this way to help you find and edit the theme's CSS in one single place.
We designed the theme in light and dark, so you can choose to use both according to your user's OS settings or manage it using a local cookie.
4) Radix UI Components
All the kits use Radix UI, arguably the best headless UI library for React.
The components are styled using Tailwind CSS. Many components are inspired by the template made by Shad CN. We recommend taking a look if you want to build your own components.
Some components are still using Headless UI, but will be phased out in the future.
5) Fully and Strictly Typed with Typescript
We wrote every single line of code with strictly-typed Typescript both on the client and server side.
6) Payload validation with Zod
The API endpoints are validated and protected with Zod, which also helps with strong-typing.
7) E2E testing with Cypress
We ship MakerKit with Cypress, likely the most popular E2E testing framework.
We made lots of examples and utilities to change the tests as you develop your application.
8) Linted with EsLint and formatted with Prettier
We lint the codebase with a very strict EsLint configuration, but we distribute it with less strict params so that it won't be in your way as you're experimenting with the starter.
We will show you how to add stricter parameters if that's your thing, but we do not recommend jumping head-in with it. It's much better to activate the stricter configuration once you have already shipped the product and are looking to stabilize it.
Furthermore, the codebase is formatted with Prettier automatically.
9) Multi-language by default with next-i18n
We configured the application to be translated by default thanks to the next-i18n package.
All the application's strings are translated by default, so you can easily extend it to other languages if necessary.
Using translation files can help you if you want to translate your apps in multiple languages, but it also allows you to find the text strings you want to replace.
In this way, you do not need to change strings in the codebase, but they're neatly organized in JSON files.
10) Logging with Pino
MakerKit uses Pino, a lightweight logging library.
API errors are logged with just enough information to help you debug your API routes.