Talent Vault

Talent Vault is the private job board for A.N. Sushi Academy: a curated marketplace of elite hospitality opportunities (private residencies, yachts, expedition cruises, luxury resorts and fine dining) for students to browse and apply to, with a full admin back office to manage opportunities and applications.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19 + TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui
• Drizzle ORM + Neon Postgres
• better-auth for authentication (email + password)
• Resend for transactional email (admin invites)

Roles

• Student / chef (default role on sign-up): registers, then must complete the qualification questionnaire at /onboarding — certificates and documents to upload, languages, experience, availability. Until every required question is answered, /opportunities and /applications redirect back to it. Once it is complete the application waits for an admin at /review ("under review"). After approval they can browse, apply or send counter-proposals, and edit their answers at any time from /profile. If an admin rejects the application, the chef sees the reason (and the questions flagged for correction) on /profile, fixes the answers and documents there and sends the application for review again.
• Admin: manages opportunities (create/edit/delete) and applications (review, change status) from /admin, configures the questionnaire at /admin/onboarding (question text in English and Italian, answer type, required or skippable, order) and reviews chef submissions and documents at /admin/chefs, where each chef can be approved or rejected with a note. The chef gets an email with the outcome (needs the Resend variables in .env.local; the decision is saved either way).

Questions, help texts and choice options each have an optional Italian wording: chefs who switch the app to IT see it, and anything left untranslated falls back to the English text. The stored answer is always the option's value slug, so translating a label never invalidates an answer already given. The admin panel itself stays in English.

• Super admin: an admin who can additionally invite new admins from /admin/team. The first super admin(s) are bootstrapped via the SUPER_ADMIN_EMAILS env var — see setup below.

Setup

1. Install dependencies

   npm install

2. Create a Neon database at neon.tech and copy its connection string.

3. Configure environment variables — copy .env.example to .env.local and fill it in:

   cp .env.example .env.local

   Variable	Description
   DATABASE_URL	Neon Postgres connection string
   BETTER_AUTH_URL	Public URL of the app (e.g. http://localhost:3000 in dev)
   BETTER_AUTH_SECRET	Random secret — generate with openssl rand -base64 32
   SUPER_ADMIN_EMAILS	Comma-separated emails to auto-promote to super admin
   BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN	Vercel Blob token, used for opportunity images and the documents chefs upload during onboarding — create a Blob store in your Vercel project, then vercel env pull .env.local
   RESEND_API_KEY	API key from resend.com, used to send admin-invite emails
   RESEND_FROM_EMAIL	Sender address — must be on a domain verified in your Resend dashboard

4. Apply the database schema

   npm run db:migrate

5. Seed the opportunities data (parses rules/opportunites.txt into the opportunities table)

   npm run db:seed

6. Seed the chef questionnaire (15 default questions — idempotent, never overwrites edits made from /admin/onboarding)

   npm run db:seed:onboarding

7. Become the first super admin: make sure your email is listed in SUPER_ADMIN_EMAILS, then start the app and register a normal account (/register) with that exact email — it will automatically be promoted to admin + super admin.

8. Run the dev server

   npm run dev

Database workflow

Schema changes go through versioned migrations rather than drizzle-kit push, since the app now holds real user data:

npm run db:generate   # generate a new migration from src/db/schema.ts
npm run db:migrate     # apply pending migrations to DATABASE_URL
npm run db:studio      # browse the database

npm run db:push still exists for quick local prototyping, but should not be used once real user data exists in an environment — prefer generate + migrate.

Deployment (Vercel)

1. Push this repository to GitHub and import it into Vercel.
2. Add all the environment variables listed above in the Vercel project settings (use your production Neon connection string and your production domain for BETTER_AUTH_URL).
3. Run npm run db:migrate against the production DATABASE_URL before (or right after) the first deploy — Vercel's build step does not run migrations automatically.
4. Verify your sending domain in the Resend dashboard so RESEND_FROM_EMAIL can actually deliver admin-invite emails in production.
5. Deploy. Register with an email from SUPER_ADMIN_EMAILS to bootstrap the first super admin in production, as in step 7 above.

Project structure

• src/db/schema.ts — Drizzle schema (better-auth tables, onboarding questions/answers/files, admin invites, opportunities, applications).
• src/lib/onboarding*.ts — the questionnaire: shared types, zod validation built from the stored question rows, the derived "onboarding complete" check used by every chef-facing gate, and the upload contract.
• src/lib/auth.ts / src/lib/auth-client.ts — better-auth server/client configuration.
• src/proxy.ts — edge-level session gate (Next.js 16's middleware.ts equivalent).
• src/app/page.tsx, src/app/login, src/app/register, src/app/accept-invite/[token] — public pages (landing, sign in, sign up, admin-invite acceptance).
• src/app/onboarding — the mandatory chef qualification questionnaire, driven by the questions the admin configured; src/app/profile — the same answers, editable later (and where a rejected chef fixes them); src/app/review — the "under review" screen. src/lib/chef-review.ts holds the review decisions; a chef's stage (incomplete, pending, approved, rejected) is derived, and a chef with a finished questionnaire and no review row is simply pending.
• src/app/opportunities, src/app/applications — chef-facing browsing and application tracking (both gated on a complete questionnaire).
• src/app/admin — admin dashboard, opportunities CRUD, applications review, questionnaire builder (/admin/onboarding), chef submissions (/admin/chefs), team/invites (super admin only).
• src/app/api/onboarding/files — client-upload token issuer and the authenticated download proxy for chef documents (blob URLs are never exposed).