Introduction
Welcome to the Launchy template — a production-ready Next.js platform for weekly product launches.
What is Launchy?
Launchy is a complete, production-ready template for running a curated weekly product launch platform - think Product Hunt, but yours, white-labeled, with every feature wired up.
You get:
- A Next.js 16 App Router codebase with TypeScript, React 19, and Tailwind CSS 4
- Better Auth (email/password + Google + GitHub OAuth, email verification, sessions, admin roles)
- PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM schema for users, products, batches, submissions, votes, sponsors, comments, blog posts
- Stripe checkout for paid tiers (Boost / Highlight) and self-serve sponsor slots with volume discounts
- An admin panel with dashboard, moderation queue, user impersonation, 25+ configurable settings
- A cron-driven weekly batch system that publishes the next queue, recomputes dofollow rules, and sends the newsletter
- Plunk transactional emails, Cloudflare R2 storage (with local fallback), Redis rate limiting, Discord admin notifications
- A built-in Tiptap blog with Shiki syntax highlighting and auto table of contents
- SEO out of the box: dynamic sitemap, OG images, JSON-LD, canonical URLs
Who is this for?
- Indie hackers wanting to ship a niche directory or launch site without reinventing the wheel
- Agencies building white-label launch platforms for clients
- Developers studying a modern, typed, production Next.js codebase
What you need
- Node.js 20+ and Bun
- PostgreSQL 15+ (Docker Compose included)
- Redis 7+ (Docker Compose included)
- A GitHub account to receive updates
Optional (features degrade gracefully when missing):
- Stripe account (paid tiers)
- Plunk account (transactional emails)
- Cloudflare R2 bucket (production image storage)
- Discord webhook URL (admin notifications)
The recommended path
Follow these pages in order to go from "just bought the template" to "running in production":
- Getting Started — clone, install, local dev in 10 min
- First Steps — create your admin, rebrand, publish your first batch
- Project Structure — 5 min orientation to the codebase
- Configure your integrations (all of these are needed for a real production site):
- Better Auth OAuth — Google + GitHub sign-in
- Stripe — Boost / Highlight / sponsor payments
- Plunk — transactional emails + newsletter
- R2 Storage — production image uploads
- Redis — rate limiting
- Turnstile — CAPTCHA on auth pages
- Discord — admin alerts
- Deploy — pick one:
- Vercel — easiest, ~10 min
- Self-hosted with Coolify — full control, ~30 min
- Post-deploy checklist — the final 11 checks at the end of Deployment Overview
The rest of the docs are reference — read them when you need the specific info.