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Important

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Payload is the first-ever Next.js native CMS that can install directly in your existing /app folder. It's the start of a new era for headless CMS.

Benefits over a regular CMS

It's both an app framework & headless CMS
Deploy anywhere, including serverless on Vercel for free
Combine your front+backend in the same /app folder if you want
Don't sign up for yet another SaaS - Payload is open source
Query your database in React Server Components
Both admin and backend are 100% extensible
No vendor lock-in
Never touch ancient WP code again
Build faster, never hit a roadblock

Quickstart

Before beginning to work with Payload, make sure you have all of the required software.

pnpx create-payload-app@latest

If you're new to Payload, you should start with the website template (pnpx create-payload-app@latest -t website). It shows how to do everything - including custom Rich Text blocks, on-demand revalidation, live preview, and more. It comes with a frontend built with Tailwind all in one /app folder.

One-click deployment options

You can deploy Payload serverlessly in one-click via Vercel and Cloudflare—giving everything you need without the hassle of the plumbing.

Deploy on Cloudflare

Fully self-contained — one click to deploy Payload with Workers, R2 for uploads, and D1 for a globally replicated database.

Deploy on Vercel

All-in-one on Vercel — one click to deploy Payload with a Next.js front end, Neon database, and Vercel Blob for media storage.

One-click templates

Jumpstart your next project with a ready-to-go template. These are production-ready, end-to-end solutions designed to get you to market fast. Build any kind of website, ecommerce store, blog, or portfolio — complete with a modern front end built using React Server Components and Tailwind.

🌐 Website

🛍️ Ecommerce 🎉 NEW 🎉

We're constantly adding more templates to our Templates Directory. If you maintain your own, add the payload-template topic to your GitHub repo so others can discover it.

🔗 Explore more:

✨ Payload Features

Completely free and open-source
Next.js native, built to run inside your /app folder
Use server components to extend Payload UI
Query your database directly in server components, no need for REST / GraphQL
Fully TypeScript with automatic types for your data
Auth out of the box
Versions and drafts
Localization
Block-based layout builder
Customizable React admin
Lexical rich text editor
Conditional field logic
Extremely granular Access Control
Document and field-level hooks for every action Payload provides
Intensely fast API
Highly secure thanks to HTTP-only cookies, CSRF protection, and more

Request Feature

🗒️ Documentation

Check out the Payload website to find in-depth documentation for everything that Payload offers.

Migrating from v2 to v3? Check out the 3.0 Migration Guide on how to do it.

🙋 Contributing

If you want to add contributions to this repository, please follow the instructions in contributing.md.

📚 Examples

The Examples Directory is a great resource for learning how to setup Payload in a variety of different ways, but you can also find great examples in our blog and throughout our social media.

If you'd like to run the examples, you can use create-payload-app to create a project from one:

npx create-payload-app --example example_name

You can see more examples at:

🔌 Plugins

Payload is highly extensible and allows you to install or distribute plugins that add or remove functionality. There are both officially-supported and community-supported plugins available. If you maintain your own plugin, consider adding the payload-plugin topic to your GitHub repository for others to find.

🚨 Need help?

There are lots of good conversations and resources in our Github Discussions board and our Discord Server. If you're struggling with something, chances are, someone's already solved what you're up against. 👇