CHASING - Mina Soroush portfolio

Bilingual (English / Persian) portfolio for Mina Soroush, metal engraving artist (Qalamzani / قلم‌زنی), working under the brand CHASING.

Persian is not a translation afterthought - every page ships in both languages and every layout has to work mirrored (RTL).

Layout

apps/
  cms/     Strapi 5 - content, bilingual via the i18n plugin
  web/     Next.js 16 - the public site
docs/      Design documents: the source of truth for the design phase
assets/    Artwork photography as delivered (see docs/05-assets.md)

docs/ is where decisions live. Read docs/README.md first.

Requirements

• Node 26 (.nvmrc) - Strapi 5 supports up to Node 26
• pnpm 10 - corepack enable or install directly
• Docker - runs Postgres for local development

First run

pnpm install
cp apps/cms/.env.example apps/cms/.env    # then fill in the secrets
pnpm db:up                                # Postgres in Docker
pnpm dev                                  # both apps

Then open http://localhost:1338/admin and create the first administrator. That account lives only in your local database; it is not shared.

	URL
Strapi admin	http://localhost:1338/admin
Strapi API	http://localhost:1338/api
Next.js site	http://localhost:3000

Strapi's default port is 1337, but it is a commonly squatted port - Razer Synapse's RzSDKServer holds 127.0.0.1:1337 on at least one dev machine. Windows lets both processes bind, and localhost silently resolves to the other one, so Strapi appears to start and then answers 426 Upgrade Required. We use 1338 to sidestep it. If a port ever behaves strangely, check with Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort <port> -State Listen.

Scripts

Command	Does
pnpm dev	Both apps in parallel
pnpm dev:cms / pnpm dev:web	One app
pnpm build	Build both
pnpm db:up / pnpm db:down	Start / stop Postgres
pnpm db:logs	Tail Postgres logs
pnpm db:reset	Destroys the database volume and starts fresh

Docker

Compose runs Postgres only. Strapi and Next run on the host via pnpm - a pnpm workspace's symlinked node_modules does not survive a bind mount cleanly, and containerising the apps buys nothing for local work. Production images are a separate decision, not yet made.

Database credentials default to chasing / chasing / chasing and are read from the same DATABASE_* variables Strapi uses, so docker-compose.yml and apps/cms/.env cannot drift apart without failing loudly.

Secrets

apps/cms/.env holds real secrets and is git-ignored. .env.example is the contract - if you add a variable, add it there too, or the next clone (or the next person) cannot start the project.

Generate a secret with:

node -e "console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(16).toString('base64'))"