It's the perfect solution to have Postgres without the need of Docker. With just `npm install`, you can have a Postgres instance on your computer. So, it's extremely easy to onboard a new developer in your team.
And, the good news, PGlite works perfectly with Next.js.
With only one command `npm install`, you can have a full-stack application, which also includes the database (a working Postgres). And, no need to have/install external tools.
Wouldn't be easier to have a shared dev database? So that each developer doesn't have to apply the migrations and import the dumps in their local db, and figure out why the local db for dev A is different than the local db for dev B.
IME, creating scaffolding to allow for a known, reproducible and clean state (of both DDL and DML) are wild systematic (eg across the team and the estate) productivity and stability boosts. Not having to be "connected to the shared dev DB frees engineers of latency (every ms counts) and also of mutulple pollutants to that database (eg Sally was writing protractor/cypresss tests and now the foo table has 3m rows, george was doing data exploration and manually entered records to the DB that now causes a runtime exception fot the team, etc)
If a shared dev DB is really what everyone wants, then at least having the scaffolding mentioned above to fix the DB state when pollution happens (it will) will help heal foot shots.
In industrialized practice, what you are mentioning (a shared dev/env) is really the "QA"/pre-prod environment.
Ideologically and personally (putting on down vote helmet) if you can't run the whole stack locally you're in for a world of trouble down the road.. local first, test extensively there, then promote changes.
I get frustrated when I join a project that doesn't allow running the full stack locally, but forces sharing parts, which always comes with limitations (not being able to work offline for starters).
It already is quite easy to spin up a local PG instance with Docker, but this probably makes it even simpler. Importing mock data and running migrations should just be 1 `npm run` command with a properly set up codebase.
A shared dev database can be okay for application dev. Locally deployable database is better imo. By nature of migration scripts running for every dev locally, it helps to better ensure the stability of said scripts. This can/should be combined with snapshot runs that represent your production environments.
More critical still if you have more than one "production" environment, where in different customers/clients may be at different application and db versions from one-another. This is often the case for large business and govt work. With shared environments it's often too easy to have a poorly adapted set of migration scripts.
You can take a look at: https://github.com/ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate, it should give you some inspiration to structure your React apps with folder structure, component breakdown.
I didn't get the change to customize the default and built-in components from Clerk. So, it's hard for me to share any experience. But, I know you can do little customization using https://clerk.com/docs/components/customization/overview and play with CSS and Tailwind CSS. Maybe, for complex customization, it's preferable to not use the pre-built components and build it yourself.
Currently, I just feel the default UI from Clerk works good with Shadcn UI, both works great together. Definitively not perfect but do a great to job for a solo developer or for a small team.
And, I mostly using for advanced authentication features like user impersonation, multi-tenancy, roles & permission.
It took me 5 months to build my first SaaS from scratch, which is way too much. For example, I could use this time to focus on marketing.
During my development process, I realized that 80% of the features I implemented were also present in other SaaS products. This is why I created Nextless.js, a SaaS Boilerplate that includes all the necessary features for launching a successful SaaS.
The example you have mentioned only uses Python in the backend. It's based on Django or Flask. Then, in the frontend, it uses JavaScript.
Building a SaaS from scratch required a lot of time. Happy to see a 100% Python SaaS Starter kit, usually it was reserved for JavaScript because of the frontend. In the past, you are forced to use JavaScript for the frontend.
I know it because I'm the author of Nextless.js [1], a full-stack JavaScript starter kit that is totally based on JavasScript, from frontend to backend. Using only one programming language was my competitive advantage compared to the boilerplate based on Ruby, Python or PHP.
I think in the future more and more languages can be used in the frontend like Rust, etc... There are already some frameworks you can use to build frontend in Rust. It's only the beginning.
It works perfectly!