/portaljs-new-portal
/portaljs-new-portal scaffolds a production-ready PortalJS data portal from a short
brief. It copies the canonical template, substitutes your project
tokens, installs dependencies, and verifies the build — so you start from a
working project, not a blank page.
When to use it
This is the first skill you run. Use it to create a new portal project; then load
data with /portaljs-add-dataset and enrich from there.
It works both inside a clone of the portaljs repo and from any other project: it prefers a local checkout of the template and otherwise fetches it from GitHub.
Inputs
A short brief in natural language. From it the skill extracts:
| Input | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Project name | Yes | Used for the page title; also derives the project slug (lowercase, hyphenated). |
| Description | No | One sentence describing the portal. Defaults to "An open data portal." |
| Language | No | The interface language — a name or code (e.g. "Italian", it, pt-BR). Defaults to English. |
| Datasets | No | File paths or URLs mentioned in the brief — added later with /portaljs-add-dataset. |
If no project name is found, the skill stops and asks for one.
It copies the canonical template, examples/portaljs-catalog — the same one
npm create portaljs scaffolds — which renders every dataset through one dynamic
/@<namespace>/<slug> route from a datasets.json manifest.
Example
/portaljs-new-portal Auckland Council Open Data Portal — public datasets for the Auckland region
Or simply:
/portaljs-new-portal "Auckland Council open data portal"
In another language:
/portaljs-new-portal Build an Italian open data portal for the Comune di Palermo
What it produces
- A new project directory named after your project slug (e.g.
auckland-council-open-data/) containing the full template — plain Next.js, Tailwind, and a few small React components you can edit by hand. - Placeholder tokens (
__PROJECT_NAME__,__PROJECT_SLUG__,__DESCRIPTION__) substituted throughout the project with your real values. - For a non-English portal, the UI translated into
locales/<code>.json(every string, with the language's plural forms), registered inlib/i18n.ts, and set as the portal's language withDEFAULT_LOCALEinnext.config.js— checked withnpm run i18n:check. Every build and deploy then ships that language. - Dependencies installed (
npm install) and the build verified, so the project runs immediately.
When it finishes:
✓ Portal scaffolded at ./auckland-council-open-data
✓ Run: cd auckland-council-open-data && npm run dev → http://localhost:3000
Where to go next
/portaljs-add-dataset— load your first dataset into the new portal.- Editing by hand — the same project, worked on directly.