Motivation

The ProofKit CLI aims to make web development easier for beginners and more efficient for experienced devs. Its opinionated structure allows for more than just a starter template or bootstrapping tool, but code-mod scripts that can modify a project after the initial setup.

ProofKit is not a JavaScript framework. It's also not the only way to build a web app. It's simply our experience of building web apps encapsulated into a CLI tool to help you structure your project and add to it over time. Each template is just a starting point, and you are free to modify any part of it as you see fit.

For the New Web Dev

The world of JavaScript and web development is vast. It can feel like you don't know where to start or that there are too many options to choose from. ProofKit is not another JavaScript framework, but merely a CLI with some opinions to help you get started building a new web app.

ProofKit assumes that you already have some basic programming skills, perhaps from another language or low-code tool. You are a problem solver who's not afraid of troubleshooting, and you probably get a little thrill when the computer finally does what you intended for it to do!

After you start a new ProofKit project, we encourage you to play around with it! Use git to commit the initial changes, then feel free to move files around, knowing you can always safely revert your changes to a known working state. We often learn best by doing, and a functional codebase is a great learning tool for you to dive into web development.

Learning Resources

A list of subjects and tutorials to guide your web development journey.

The ProofKit Tech Stack

Here is a list of the frameworks and packages that you'll come across in a ProofKit project, the reasons why we chose them, and links to their own docs.

Browser-based Frameworks / Packages

Next.js

A well-supported open-source React framework for full-stack web applications. This means it runs code on your frontend (in the client's web browser) and backend (on the web server, or API routes). It makes it easy to get a web app up and running with all the features that we expect from a modern web app and is used by companies of all sizes to power their online presence.

Mantine

A vast, themeable component library for React. We use their default components and styles to build apps very quickly, but with the option of adding custom styles or themes later if needed. Mantine also includes many helpful React hooks, and they provide a Modal and Notification system to ProofKit apps.

Why not tailwind css and/or shadcn/ui? We've chosen to focus on Mantine because it has allowed our team to work much faster for the kinds of web apps that we build for our clients. When you're working on multiple projects at once, it's actually a benefit to not own the component code within an individual codebase, so that it can be more easily upgraded when the time comes. However, we have not ruled out other components and style systems and may add support for them in the future.

Tanstack Query

Sometimes also known as "React Query"; a library for managing server state in React. It's used by ProofKit to fetch data from external sources, such as REST APIs, so we can be certain that the "shape" of our data matches what we expected during development.

Zod

A type-safe validation library for JavaScript and TypeScript. It's used by ProofKit to validate all inputs from external sources, such as REST APIs, so we can be certain that the "shape" of our data matches what we expected during development. It's also used in form validation.

next-safe-action

A wrapper around Next.js actions that include middleware (for easily checking that a user is signed in) and input validation with zod schemas.

Authentication

Clerk

A hosted authentication service that is extremely easy to set up and use. It's a great choice to secure most customer-facing web apps, including built-in features such as Social logins, magic link, multi-factor authentication, and more.

Self-Hosted Auth

For when you need a bit more flexibility or if you want to self-host the authentication layer, ProofKit can also scaffold out all the security functions required for you to manage your own authentication. Learn more in this guide: FileMaker Add-on Auth