The 15-minute quick start

0. What you'll need

A GitHub account, Node 20+, and free-tier accounts on Vercel (hosting), Neon (Postgres), and Resend or Mailgun (email – sent from your own account; Calstead never relays mail for you). The wizard links you to each at the right moment, so you can also just start and create accounts as you go.

1. Clone your copy

After purchase you're invited to the private repo. Accept the invite, then:

git clone git@github.com:OWNER/calstead.git
cd calstead
npm install

2. Run the wizard

npm run setup

It walks through every setting and validates each one live: it connects to your database (and offers to run the one-time migration), fetches your calendar's ICS feed and reports how many busy events it found, checks your email provider and sends you a test email, and builds your event types interactively. The result is a complete .env.local plus an event-types config file.

3. Try it locally

npm run dev

Your booking page is at localhost:3000, reading your real calendar.

4. Deploy

Push your configured copy to a private repo on your own GitHub, import it at vercel.com/new, and let the wizard push your env vars (or paste them in the dashboard). Point your domain at it. Done – bookings land in your database and both parties get calendar invites by email.

A /setup diagnostics page (gated by a token the wizard generates) verifies the deployed config end-to-end: database, calendar feeds, email, every optional feature.

Updating later

git remote add upstream git@github.com:OWNER/calstead.git
git pull upstream main

Your configuration lives in env vars and a local config file upstream never ships, so pulls don't conflict with your setup.