Admin Panel

Nextly ships with a full-featured admin panel for managing your collections, singles, media library, users, and settings without leaving the browser. It is mounted at /admin and is rendered by the same Next.js app that exports the Nextly route handlers, so there is no separate service to deploy.

Accessing the admin panel

The first time you visit /admin and the database has no users, Nextly redirects you to a setup wizard at /admin/setup to create the initial Super Admin account. After that, sign in at /admin/login.

https://your-app.com/admin

Authentication is custom (email + password, JWT-backed sessions, API keys, RBAC) — see Authentication for the full reference.

Navigation structure

The admin uses a dual-sidebar layout on desktop. A narrow icon strip on the far left lists the top-level sections; clicking one reveals a wider inner sidebar with the items inside that section. On screens narrower than 1024px the layout switches to a single hamburger drawer automatically — no configuration required.

The top-level sections (in order) are:

Collection and Single icons are added to the primary sidebar dynamically as you register collections / singles in nextly.config.ts (or create them via the Visual Schema Builder). The Builder icon is always present but can be hidden in production; see Schema Builder visibility for the admin.branding.showBuilder toggle.

What you can do in each section

Content management

Every collection registered in nextly.config.ts gets a list view with filtering, sorting, pagination, and search. Click an entry to open the editing form; inputs are rendered field-type-aware (rich-text editor for richText, date picker for date, file picker for upload, related-document picker for relationship, and so on).

Singles render a single editing form at /admin/singles/[slug] instead of a list view, since each Single has exactly one document.

Media Library

A central media library at /admin/media supports drag-and-drop uploads, thumbnails, and file metadata editing. upload fields across all collections reference this library; uploading from inside an upload field writes to the same store. The default backend writes to ./public/uploads/ on local disk; configure a different storage adapter in nextly.config.ts to use S3, Vercel Blob, or UploadThing.

Visual Schema Builder

The Visual Schema Builder lets you create and edit Collections, Singles, and Components without writing TypeScript. It generates the same artifacts the code-first approach produces. See Visual Schema Builder for the full reference.

Users, Roles, and Custom Fields

The Users section groups three pages:

• Users (/admin/users) — list, create, edit, and disable user accounts.
• Roles (/admin/security/roles) — create roles and assign permissions to them. The setup wizard seeds a Super Admin role that holds every permission and assigns it to the first user.
• Custom Fields (/admin/users/fields) — add extra fields to the user model. Only scalar field types are accepted on user records; see the users reference in nextly.config.ts.

Settings

The Settings inner sidebar is split into sub-groups:

• System — General (site-wide settings) and API Keys.
• Email — Email Providers (Resend, SMTP, etc.), Email Templates, and Email Layout.

Image-size presets and the (programmatic) Permissions page also live under settings.

Permissions

Nextly's RBAC model uses permission slugs in the form <action>-<resource> (e.g. read-users, create-roles, update-api-keys, manage-settings). Permissions and the Super Admin role are seeded the first time the database is set up — for the core resources (users, roles, permissions) the seeder creates one row per (action, resource) pair across create, read, update, delete. See packages/nextly/src/database/seeders/permissions.ts for the seeder source.

The admin sidebar is permission-gated. The built-in mapping is:

Permissions for collections you define in nextly.config.ts follow the same slug pattern (read-posts, update-posts, etc.); they are wired up automatically when the collection is registered. Assign permissions to roles from /admin/security/roles.

Plugins in the admin

A plugin can register sidebar entries via its admin.placement setting. Until at least one plugin is installed, the Plugins section is hidden. When a plugin does add entries, they appear under the section the plugin chose (Collections, Singles, Users, Settings, Plugins, or Standalone). You can override the placement and appearance per-plugin from admin.pluginOverrides in nextly.config.ts; see Customization.

Next steps

• Visual Schema Builder — design content types without writing code
• Customization — sidebar config, navigation permissions, plugin overrides
• Branding — logo, favicon, color scheme, Builder visibility
• Collections — code-first collection definitions
• Singles — code-first Single definitions