Stars

Core concepts

PortalJS rests on four ideas. Understand these and the skills, the template, and the decisions behind them all make sense.

1. A lightweight template + agentic skills

For years, building a data portal meant wiring up a heavy component library, fighting bundle sizes, and writing boilerplate for every dataset page and catalog view. PortalJS replaces that with two smaller pieces:

  • A lightweight, customizable template — plain Next.js, Tailwind, and a few small React components (Table, charts, maps added only when you need them). No monolithic, non-tree-shakeable bundle.
  • A set of agentic skills — /new-portal, /add-dataset, /add-chart, /add-map, /connect-ckan, /deploy — that do the repetitive assembly.

The work moves from writing boilerplate to describing intent. The framework stays small and easy to own; the agent does the assembly.

2. Plain, editable code — no lock-in

Every skill produces plain, readable code you can clone, fork, and edit by hand. There is no magic runtime interpreting a config file at request time, and nothing is feature-gated behind a hosted product.

This is what AI-native, not AI-only means: the skills are the fast path, but the output is an ordinary Next.js project. You can scaffold with skills today and hand the repo to a developer who's never heard of them — see Manual setup.

3. Decoupled by default

The frontend is independent from the backend and talks to it over an API. The same portal frontend can sit in front of:

  • CKAN, DKAN, OpenMetadata, Microsoft Purview, DataHub
  • GitHub-backed and Frictionless datasets
  • plain JSON / static files (the default — no backend at all)
  • a custom backend you already run

Start with static CSVs in /public/data/, then point the portal at a real catalog later with /connect-ckan — without rewriting the frontend.

4. Bring your own stack

PortalJS ships a sensible default template, but never forces a frontend toolchain or design system on a team that already has one. The components are small and swappable; the styling is plain Tailwind. Adopt the whole template, or lift the skills and ideas into an existing app.

How it fits together

You describe intent  ──►  Agentic skill  ──►  Plain editable code
   "add this CSV"          /add-dataset        pages/datasets/*.tsx
                                                public/data/*.csv

The skills are first-class citizens of the repo: documented, tested end-to-end, and composable. Anyone can author one — see the authoring guide.

Where to go next

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