dammycodes-all/hackathon-starter

Hackathon Starter is a ready made template for building a web application quickly, designed for the time pressure of a hackathon where teams need to skip setup and start building features right away. Instead of wiring together authentication, a database, and an AI powered chat feature from scratch, a developer clones this project and already has all of that in place. It is built on Next.js, a popular framework for building web applications with React, using its newer App Router style of organizing pages. User login and account handling is handled by a library called Better Auth. Data is stored in a Postgres database, hosted through a service called Neon, and accessed using an ORM called Drizzle ORM, which is a tool that lets developers work with database tables using regular code instead of writing raw SQL. For AI features, it uses the Vercel AI SDK together with Groq, a fast AI inference provider, so streaming AI responses can be added to the app without building that plumbing manually. The visual interface is built with shadcn or ui components and Tailwind CSS, a utility based styling system, and forms are handled with react hook form paired with Zod for validating user input. Getting started involves cloning the repository, installing dependencies with the pnpm package manager, copying an example environment file and filling in a few required values such as the database connection string and an API key for Groq, then pushing the database schema and starting the development server. The project also includes ready made scripts for building for production, linting the code with a tool called Biome, checking TypeScript types, and managing database migrations. The code is organized into clearly separated folders for pages, reusable interface components, shared utilities, and server only logic. It is released under the MIT license.