Skip to main content
Ship is an AI-native, batteries-included full-stack TypeScript SaaS starter. It gives you a production-ready API and web app, a plugin system for every feature, and standardised patterns that you — and your AI agents — can build on without guesswork.
Build products, not boilerplate.
Ship has been live-tested on 100+ products at Paralect. 3.0.0 rebuilds it on a modern, type-safe stack — TanStack Start, Hono + oRPC, Drizzle + PostgreSQL — and ships first-class context for coding agents.

​
What you get

@paralect/ship scaffolds a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo in one of two shapes:

PostgreSQL + TanStack Start

Full-stack. A Hono + oRPC + Drizzle API (apps/api) and a TanStack Start web app (apps/web), with end-to-end type safety flowing from the API to the client.

TanStack Start web-only

Web-only. A standalone TanStack Start SPA (apps/web) with no separate API — your backend logic lives in type-safe server functions.
Auth, file storage, email, AI chat and an admin panel are plugins you opt into — each copies into your codebase, so you own and can edit every line.

​
AI-native by design

Ship is built so coding agents have ground truth and one obvious way to do things:
  • AGENTS.md at the repo root and scoped to apps/api and apps/web, plus a progressive-disclosure index of workflow docs.
  • Skills for the patterns that matter — no-useEffect, TanStack Start server functions, scaffolding with the CLI.
  • Codegen keeps the oRPC router, contract, typed client and DbService in sync, so the types an agent reads are always real.
  • Standardised patterns — every resource owns its endpoints, schemas, jobs, crons and methods, mounted by file path. Less to infer, less to get wrong.
  • llms.txt for dropping the whole docs set into Cursor, Claude or ChatGPT.

​
Quick start

npx @paralect/ship init
npx create-ship-app@latest init works too — it resolves to the same CLI.
The CLI asks which setup you want, lets you pick plugins, and chooses a deployment target. Then: 
cd my-ship-app
pnpm start
pnpm start brings up infrastructure, runs migrations, and starts every service. 🚀

​
Key principles

​
🧭 Standardised patterns. Zero guesswork.

Every resource owns its endpoints, schemas, jobs, crons and methods. File-based mounting and end-to-end type safety mean there’s one obvious way to build — easy for you and your agents to follow.

​
🔌 Everything is a plugin. Every plugin is your code.

Install a feature with one command and it copies into your repo — edit, extend, delete. Like shadcn/ui, but for your entire stack.

​
🚀 Production-ready.

Auth, migrations, background jobs, file storage, websockets, email, logging and CI are wired up and battle-tested on real products.

​
🥷 For developers and their agents.

Ship is written to be read — by humans and by the models that now write half the code. The docs explain how things work and why.

​
Next steps