Architecture

Overview

Ship is a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo built on a focused, modern TypeScript stack.

Layer	Stack
Web (`apps/web`)	TanStack Start (SPA) · TanStack Router · TanStack Query · shadcn/ui · Tailwind v4
API (`apps/api`)	Hono · oRPC · Drizzle ORM · PostgreSQL · better-auth · Socket.IO
Tooling	Turborepo · pnpm · Docker · drizzle-kit · TypeScript

On a high level Ship consists of these parts:

Both options share the same apps/web base (a landing page + an example server function). They differ in whether an API app exists:

PostgreSQL + TanStack Start — full-stack. apps/web talks to apps/api through a fully typed oRPC client. Add the Auth plugin and the web app gains sign-in/up, the authenticated app shell, and the client wiring.
TanStack Start web-only — no apps/api. Backend logic runs as server functions inside the Start server. No database or auth unless you add them.

Types flow from the API to the web app through TypeScript declarations — no codegen, no shared types package:

An endpoint declares .input(zodSchema).output(zodSchema).handler(...).
pnpm --filter api build:types emits .d.ts files.
The web app depends on "api": "workspace:*" and imports import type { AppClient } from 'api'.

Within the API, three codegen scripts keep the wiring in sync with the filesystem:

Script	Generates	Run after
`scripts/codegen-router.ts`	`src/router.ts` + `src/contract.ts`	adding/removing an endpoint file
`scripts/codegen-db.ts`	`src/db.ts` (typed `DbService` per table)	adding/removing a schema file

See How Ship works for the resource-owns-everything model behind this.

A running full-stack project exposes two local dashboards:

API reference — a Scalar UI at http://localhost:3001/docs (raw OpenAPI 3.1 at /spec.json), served in-process by Hono in non-production.
Database browser — Drizzle Studio at https://local.drizzle.studio, started with pnpm dashboard.

pnpm start        # infra → migrate → scheduler → api + web
pnpm turbo-start  # dev via Turborepo (assumes infra already running)

Run infrastructure (PostgreSQL + Redis) on its own with pnpm infra, or individual services with pnpm --filter api dev / pnpm --filter web dev.