Describe the bug
After getting past this issue just to install the repo: #678, and following the directions on 4 different documentation pages, pnpm dev still will not launch the apps successfully.

The directions on these two pages conflict with one another: https://www.next-forge.com/docs/setup/env and https://www.next-forge.com/docs/setup/prerequisites. I tried following the minimum setup: https://www.next-forge.com/docs/setup/env#quick-start-minimum-setup, and encountered several issues when running pnpm dev. It seems that the "optional" environment variables are not optional.

Separately, the arguments being passed to the Prisma CLI are not compatible with version 7.

I had to use claude code to see if it could get things running. It summarized the changes that it made:

Here's a summary of what I fixed:

  1. Prisma Studio (studio) - Updated apps/studio/package.json to use --config instead of --schema (Prisma 7.x change)

  2. dotenv loading - Fixed packages/database/prisma.config.ts to load .env from the correct path

  3. Empty env vars failing validation - Commented out empty env vars in all .env.local files (empty strings fail format validation even for optional fields)

  4. Made several keys optional for local dev:
  - packages/analytics/keys.ts - PostHog keys
  - packages/email/keys.ts - Resend keys
  - packages/payments/keys.ts - Stripe secret key

  5. Set DATABASE_URL - Added the postgres connection string to all app .env.local files

  Remaining issues:
  - docs - Mintlify doesn't support Node 25+. You'd need to downgrade Node or skip docs
  - Stripe CLI - Needs stripe login to authenticate (optional for basic dev)

  You can run pnpm turbo dev --filter=app --filter=web --filter=api to start just the main apps.

It would be great if there was one documentation page that contained setup instructions to get the stack running. At least the documentation pages should not contradict one another. At this point, it seems that I need to setup an account on every service that Next Forge integrates with, and then downgrade my node version. But i have no idea if that will be enough to get this running.

It seems possible to provide a stack that doesn't need every integration configured just to get running. This would drastically reduce the time investment required to do a basic evaluation of Next Forge to see if it's a stack we want to leverage.

The quantity and types of issues I have seen so far casts a significant amount of doubt in my mind about whether this is the direction we want to go.

next-forge version
latest

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: macOS
• Browser: Chrome