First Steps

Now that your local dev runs at http://localhost:3000, here's what to do before sharing your instance with anyone.

1. Create your admin account

If you ran bun run setup, its final output walks you through this. Summary:

1. Sign up at /sign-up with your email
2. Verify your email — without Plunk configured, the link is printed to your bun dev terminal:

   [Email] Plunk not configured — verification link for [email protected]:
     http://localhost:3000/api/auth/verify-email?token=...

   Copy it into your browser. Once Plunk is configured, real emails are sent.
3. Promote yourself with the helper script:

   bun run promote-admin [email protected]

   The script sets role = 'admin' and revokes your active sessions so the role change picks up immediately.
4. Sign out, then sign in again → the /admin link appears in the header.

Alternative: open Drizzle Studio (bun run db:studio), find your row in user, change role to admin. You still need to sign out + back in (Better Auth caches the session role for 5 min).

2. Rebrand

Everything rebrandable lives under /admin/settings. Changes apply instantly (no redeploy).

Minimum checklist:

Replace public/logo.webp and public/logo-dark.webp with your own.

See the full settings reference for all 28 keys.

3. Seed demo content (optional)

If you want something to look at while developing:

bun scripts/seed-products.ts

Inserts a batch with 9 demo products. You can delete them later from /admin/products.

4. Submit your first real product

/submit while logged in. The submission lands in /admin/submissions with status pending. Accept it there to schedule it to the next batch.

Paid tiers (Boost / Highlight) require Stripe — skip for now and test with free tier.

5. Trigger the weekly batch locally

You don't need to wait for a real cron. Hit the endpoint with curl:

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRON_SECRET" \
  http://localhost:3000/api/cron/weekly-batch

Make sure CRON_SECRET is set in your .env first. The call will:

1. Create a batch for the current ISO week
2. Publish your accepted submissions into it
3. Set dofollow flags
4. Create and send a Plunk campaign (if Plunk is configured)
5. Revalidate / and /batches

Or use the in-memory simulation:

bun scripts/simulate-crons.ts

This is a dry-run that doesn't actually mutate the database or send emails.

6. Verify everything works

• Homepage shows the new batch
• Each product has its thumbnail
• Voting works
• Commenting works (sign in as a second user to test)
• /admin/content shows the calendar view
• Dofollow check: view source on a product link from a Boost/Highlight submission — should NOT have rel="nofollow"

What to configure next

Start with the integrations that match your goals:

Then pick a deployment path (Vercel or self-hosted).