NextChair

NextChair is a multi-tenant, white-label booking platform for barbershops. The application is being rebuilt as a conventional Laravel web application using PHP, MySQL, Blade, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, and Vite.

The audited Next.js implementation is preserved in legacy-nextjs as the functional and visual migration reference. The Laravel application has its own deployment-neutral Docker option at the repository root; files inside legacy-nextjs are not used by it.

Local development

composer install
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
npm install
npm run build
php artisan serve

Configure the MySQL connection in .env before running migrations. The application resolves a business only from the request hostname through the business_domains table; it never guesses a tenant from the first business in the database. For local multi-tenant work, map each configured hostname to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts.

Platform and tenant setup

Migrations create schema only. They do not create a demo business or a business owner. After migrating, open /install once and create the platform administrator. That account can sign in at /manager/sign-in, create businesses, edit their primary domains, and share the one-time owner setup link generated during provisioning.

Business provisioning creates the tenant domain, settings, booking rules, opening hours, system roles, owner staff profile, and seven-day owner invitation in one transaction. The owner chooses a password through that invitation; platform administrators and business owners are separate account types.

If demo data is useful for local development, opt into the existing seeder explicitly:

NEXTCHAIR_SEED_DEMO=true php artisan db:seed

Docker deployment

The root compose.yaml runs Laravel with PHP 8.4 FPM, Nginx, MySQL 8, the database-backed queue worker, and the scheduler. It does not include or configure Caddy; an existing reverse proxy can forward traffic to Nginx on 127.0.0.1:8085.

First run:

cp .env.example .env

Set private values in .env, including:

APP_URL=http://localhost:8085
APP_KEY=
DB_HOST=db
DB_DATABASE=nextchair
DB_USERNAME=nextchair
DB_PASSWORD=replace-with-a-private-password
DB_ROOT_PASSWORD=replace-with-a-private-root-password

Then build and start the stack:

docker compose build
docker compose up -d
docker compose exec app php artisan key:generate
docker compose exec app php artisan migrate

Then visit http://localhost:8085/install to create the first platform administrator. Do not run migrations or create tenants from container startup; the tenant owner is provisioned manually from Manager.

Migrations are intentionally not run by container startup. To inspect the application logs:

docker compose logs -f app nginx queue scheduler db

The default host binding is 127.0.0.1:8085:80. Override it with NEXTCHAIR_HTTP_BIND and NEXTCHAIR_HTTP_PORT in .env when needed. MySQL has no published host port and is reachable only as db:3306 inside Compose.

Verification

php artisan test
npm run build