PortalJS — New Portal

Overview

Scaffold a production-ready PortalJS data portal from a brief. The skill is interactive: if the brief is thin it interviews the user in three short rounds (mapped to the template's three surfaces — Home, Catalog, Showcase), echoes a brief back for confirmation, then copies examples/portaljs-catalog (locally or via a remote tiged fetch), substitutes placeholder tokens, sets the namespace mode and the UI language, seeds any datasets named in the interview, installs dependencies, and verifies the scaffold with a type check.

Prerequisites

Node.js >=22 and npm available on PATH.
Network access, unless a current local checkout of the portaljs repo is available (the resolver defaults to a remote fetch of the template).
A destination directory name that does not already contain files (or user consent to overwrite one that does).

Instructions

The canonical, full step-by-step workflow is .claude/commands/portaljs-new-portal.md — the single source of truth. Read and follow it when executing. Summary:

Interview the user in up to three rounds — Home/basics (incl. the UI language, default English), Catalog & discovery (datasets, namespace mode theme vs owner), Showcase/views — skipping any round already answered by the input brief. Accept "use defaults" at any point.
Confirm a short brief (name, slug, description, language, namespace, datasets, views) before building.
Resolve the template source: prefer a remote tiged fetch of examples/portaljs-catalog at main (or PORTALJS_TEMPLATE_REF); use a local checkout only when it is current (has pages/[owner]/[slug].tsx) and the destination is outside that repo.
Materialize the template into ./PROJECT_SLUG, asking first if the destination already exists and is non-empty.
Substitute __PROJECT_NAME__, __PROJECT_SLUG__, __DESCRIPTION__ tokens across all files with perl -pi, escaping /, \, and & in the values.
Set NAMESPACE_TYPE ('theme' or 'owner') in lib/datasets.ts per the interview.
Set the UI language (skip for English): translate locales/en.json into locales/<code>.json (every key, {placeholders} verbatim, the plural forms the language uses, _intl BCP 47 tag such as it-IT), register it in lib/i18n.ts, set DEFAULT_LOCALE in next.config.js, and run npm run i18n:check.
Seed datasets captured in Round 2 (via /portaljs-add-dataset or by hand), or clear datasets.json to [] if none were named.
Run npm install inside the scaffolded portal.
Verify with npm run i18n:check and npx tsc --noEmit (never next build here — it would corrupt a running dev server's .next/ directory).
Report the scaffolded routes, namespace mode, language, and next steps.

Output

Created: a new directory ./PROJECT_SLUG/ containing the full examples/portaljs-catalog template with tokens substituted.
Modified: lib/datasets.ts (NAMESPACE_TYPE); datasets.json (seeded datasets or cleared to []); for a non-English portal, locales/<code>.json (created), lib/i18n.ts (registered) and next.config.js (DEFAULT_LOCALE).
Verified: npm run i18n:check and npx tsc --noEmit pass inside the scaffolded portal.
Result: a runnable portal at ./PROJECT_SLUG with Home (/), Catalog (/search), and Showcase (/@<namespace>/<slug>) surfaces wired up.

Error Handling

Symptom	Cause	Fix
`DIR_EXISTS`	`./PROJECT_SLUG` already exists and is non-empty	Ask the user for a different name or consent to remove it; then proceed.
Remote fetch fails	Bad `PORTALJS_TEMPLATE_REF`, network outage, or `tiged` unavailable	Tell the user plainly and ask to retry, use a different ref, or check network.
Stale local scaffold (`pages/datasets/[slug].tsx`)	Old local clone missing `pages/[owner]/[slug].tsx`	Resolver already falls back to remote in this case — do not force local mode.
`npm install` fails	Node <22 or no network	Report the error and ask the user to check Node version and connectivity.
`tsc --noEmit` fails	Token substitution or manifest error	Print the log and fix before reporting success — never report success with a failing type check.

Examples

Example 1 — Full brief up front

/portaljs-new-portal Auckland Open Data Portal — datasets published by several council
departments (multiple publishers). Start with ./data/parks.csv and ./data/budget.csv.

Infers name + description, picks NAMESPACE_TYPE = 'owner', asks for namespace values (e.g. parks-dept, finance), confirms the brief, scaffolds the template, and seeds both datasets at /@parks-dept/parks and /@finance/budget.

Example 2 — No arguments, full interview

/portaljs-new-portal

Runs all three interview rounds from scratch, accepting "use defaults" for any round, then confirms the brief before scaffolding.

Example 3 — Single-publisher portal with no datasets yet

/portaljs-new-portal Reference Data Hub — a single-team reference catalog, no data yet.

Picks NAMESPACE_TYPE = 'theme' with namespace reference, clears datasets.json to [], and reports /portaljs-add-dataset as the next step.

Resources

Full workflow: .claude/commands/portaljs-new-portal.md
Template and token reference: references/reference.md
Related skills: portaljs-add-dataset, portaljs-add-chart, portaljs-add-map, portaljs-connect-ckan
PortalJS documentation: https://portaljs.org