Installation

Local Letter is a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo. One install at the root gets you every app.

Requirements

Node.js 20 or newer
pnpm 10.x — corepack enable picks up the version pinned in the root package.json
A Postgres database — local or hosted, anything Prisma can reach

Clone and install


git clone https://github.com/Sagar9980/local-letter.git
cd local-letter
pnpm install

Create your env files

Each app reads its config from environment variables. Copy the example file for the apps you plan to run:


cp apps/api/.env.example apps/api/.env
cp apps/web/.env.example apps/web/.env
cp apps/site/.env.example apps/site/.env   # optional — marketing site only

Then open apps/api/.env and fill in two values that have no sensible default:

apps/api/.env


DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/local_letter"
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET="replace-with-a-long-random-secret"

A good secret is any long random string:


openssl rand -base64 32

Every variable is listed on the Configuration page.

Apply the database schema


pnpm --filter @local-letter/api exec prisma migrate dev

This creates the tables for users, sessions, projects, templates, template locales and API keys.

Start everything


pnpm dev

Turborepo starts all three apps at once:

App	URL
API	`http://localhost:4000`
Dashboard	`http://localhost:5173`
Marketing site	`http://localhost:5174`
Docs (this site)	`http://localhost:5175`

To run just one, filter by package name:


pnpm --filter @local-letter/web dev

Check that the API is up


curl http://localhost:4000/health


{ "success": true, "statusCode": 200, "message": "Service is healthy", "data": { "status": "ok" } }

The dashboard talks to the API across origins, so WEB_ORIGIN in apps/api/.env must match the URL the dashboard is served from. With the defaults above they already line up.

Other root scripts

Every root script fans out across the workspace the same way dev does:


pnpm build      # build every app
pnpm lint       # lint every app
pnpm typecheck  # typecheck every app
pnpm test       # run every test suite

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