PortalJS — New Portal
Overview
Scaffold a production-ready PortalJS data portal from a brief. The skill is
interactive: if the brief is thin it interviews the user in three short rounds
(mapped to the template's three surfaces — Home, Catalog, Showcase), echoes a brief
back for confirmation, then copies examples/portaljs-catalog (locally or via a
remote tiged fetch), substitutes placeholder tokens, sets the namespace mode and the
UI language, seeds any datasets named in the interview, installs dependencies, and verifies the scaffold
with a type check.
Prerequisites
- Node.js >=22 and npm available on
PATH.
- Network access, unless a current local checkout of the portaljs repo is available
(the resolver defaults to a remote fetch of the template).
- A destination directory name that does not already contain files (or user consent
to overwrite one that does).
Instructions
The canonical, full step-by-step workflow is
.claude/commands/portaljs-new-portal.md —
the single source of truth. Read and follow it when executing. Summary:
- Interview the user in up to three rounds — Home/basics (incl. the UI language,
default English), Catalog & discovery
(datasets, namespace mode
theme vs owner), Showcase/views — skipping any round
already answered by the input brief. Accept "use defaults" at any point.
- Confirm a short brief (name, slug, description, language, namespace, datasets,
views) before building.
- Resolve the template source: prefer a remote
tiged fetch of
examples/portaljs-catalog at main (or PORTALJS_TEMPLATE_REF); use a local
checkout only when it is current (has pages/[owner]/[slug].tsx) and the
destination is outside that repo.
- Materialize the template into
./PROJECT_SLUG, asking first if the destination
already exists and is non-empty.
- Substitute
__PROJECT_NAME__, __PROJECT_SLUG__, __DESCRIPTION__ tokens
across all files with perl -pi, escaping /, \, and & in the values.
- Set
NAMESPACE_TYPE ('theme' or 'owner') in lib/datasets.ts per the
interview.
- Set the UI language (skip for English): translate
locales/en.json into
locales/<code>.json (every key, {placeholders} verbatim, the plural forms the
language uses, _intl BCP 47 tag such as it-IT), register it in lib/i18n.ts,
set DEFAULT_LOCALE in next.config.js, and run npm run i18n:check.
- Seed datasets captured in Round 2 (via
/portaljs-add-dataset or by hand), or
clear datasets.json to [] if none were named.
- Run
npm install inside the scaffolded portal.
- Verify with
npm run i18n:check and npx tsc --noEmit (never next build here —
it would corrupt a running dev server's .next/ directory).
- Report the scaffolded routes, namespace mode, language, and next steps.
Output
- Created: a new directory
./PROJECT_SLUG/ containing the full
examples/portaljs-catalog template with tokens substituted.
- Modified:
lib/datasets.ts (NAMESPACE_TYPE); datasets.json (seeded
datasets or cleared to []); for a non-English portal, locales/<code>.json
(created), lib/i18n.ts (registered) and next.config.js (DEFAULT_LOCALE).
- Verified:
npm run i18n:check and npx tsc --noEmit pass inside the scaffolded
portal.
- Result: a runnable portal at
./PROJECT_SLUG with Home (/), Catalog
(/search), and Showcase (/@<namespace>/<slug>) surfaces wired up.
Error Handling
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|
DIR_EXISTS | ./PROJECT_SLUG already exists and is non-empty | Ask the user for a different name or consent to remove it; then proceed. |
| Remote fetch fails | Bad PORTALJS_TEMPLATE_REF, network outage, or tiged unavailable | Tell the user plainly and ask to retry, use a different ref, or check network. |
Stale local scaffold (pages/datasets/[slug].tsx) | Old local clone missing pages/[owner]/[slug].tsx | Resolver already falls back to remote in this case — do not force local mode. |
npm install fails | Node <22 or no network | Report the error and ask the user to check Node version and connectivity. |
tsc --noEmit fails | Token substitution or manifest error | Print the log and fix before reporting success — never report success with a failing type check. |
Examples
Example 1 — Full brief up front
/portaljs-new-portal Auckland Open Data Portal — datasets published by several council
departments (multiple publishers). Start with ./data/parks.csv and ./data/budget.csv.
Infers name + description, picks NAMESPACE_TYPE = 'owner', asks for namespace
values (e.g. parks-dept, finance), confirms the brief, scaffolds the template, and
seeds both datasets at /@parks-dept/parks and /@finance/budget.
Example 2 — No arguments, full interview
/portaljs-new-portal
Runs all three interview rounds from scratch, accepting "use defaults" for any round,
then confirms the brief before scaffolding.
Example 3 — Single-publisher portal with no datasets yet
/portaljs-new-portal Reference Data Hub — a single-team reference catalog, no data yet.
Picks NAMESPACE_TYPE = 'theme' with namespace reference, clears datasets.json to
[], and reports /portaljs-add-dataset as the next step.
Resources