GitHub - shrimbly/book-the-lakehouse: Simple booking calendar app for shared holiday homes.

A small app for sharing the family holiday home without turning the family chat into a booking tribunal: a private calendar with a shared PIN, optional stay costs, bank transfer details, photos from the trip, and just enough ceremony to keep everyone honest.

What It Does

For families with a lakehouse, bach, cabin, cottage, or other beloved place that people take turns using.

• Pick your identity, then claim dates on a spacious month calendar.
• Edit and delete your own stays — no global admin powers required.
• Optional nightly costs, bank details, and a transfer prompt at booking time.
• Mary mode — a quiet admin area where trusted users can tick off paid stays.
• Profile and stay photos when Vercel Blob is configured.
• Runs locally with demo data before you connect Neon.
• Rename the place, people, footer, PIN, colors, and cookie prefix to suit your own family.
• Agent-friendly: hand the codebase to an AI assistant, or run /setup (or npm run setup) to wire up database, storage, and family settings in one go.

Mary mode is named for my aunt Mary, who embodies the idea of an admin far better than the word "admin" ever could.

Simple Setup

If you have an AI coding assistant, type /setup in the chat. Otherwise run the interactive wizard:

It checks the Vercel CLI, walks you through linking the Neon Postgres and Vercel Blob integrations, pulls the connection strings down for you, prompts for your family-specific settings (PIN, site title, nightly costs, bank details, admins), and runs the initial schema push and seed.

Once it finishes, you're good to go.

Manual Setup (Alternative)

If you prefer to configure the application manually:

1. Fork and clone this repo.
2. Create a Vercel project from your fork. The Hobby plan is a good starting point for personal use.
3. Add the Neon integration for Vercel. It creates the Postgres database and wires the database environment variables for you. Neon's Free plan is fine for getting started.
4. Add the Vercel Blob integration if you want profile photos and stay photos. Vercel handles the Blob environment variable too.
5. Add your app-specific settings from .env.example, especially FAMILY_PIN and the NEXT_PUBLIC_* display text.
6. Run npm run db:push once, then npm run db:seed to add starter people and sample bookings.

That is the whole shape of it: Vercel runs the app, Neon keeps the calendar, and Blob stores the nice little photos.

Local Development

For tinkering before deployment:

git clone https://github.com/shrimbly/book-the-lakehouse.git
cd book-the-lakehouse
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

With only .env.example copied, the app can render with demo data. Add DATABASE_URL when you are ready for real bookings to stick around.

Environment Variables

Create .env.local in the project root:

Most of the database, Blob storage, and Vercel-specific values can be created for you by the Vercel Neon and Vercel Blob integrations. Once they exist in Vercel, pull them down locally with:

vercel env pull .env.local

Then add the app-specific bits, like FAMILY_PIN, display text, Marys, and any optional stay-cost details.

FAMILY_PIN=1234
DATABASE_URL=postgres://...
BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN=vercel_blob_rw_...

BOOKING_COST_PER_NIGHT=50
BOOKING_COST_CURRENCY=NZD
PAYMENT_ACCOUNT_NAME="Lakehouse Account"
PAYMENT_ACCOUNT_NUMBER="12-3456-7890123-00"
PAYMENT_REFERENCE="Lakehouse stay"
PAYMENT_NOTE="Please transfer after booking."
MARY_IDS=mary

NEXT_PUBLIC_HOME_NAME="Book the lakehouse"
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_DESCRIPTION="A private family booking calendar for the lakehouse."
NEXT_PUBLIC_FOOTER_TEXT="Book the lakehouse"
NEXT_PUBLIC_REPO_URL="https://github.com/shrimbly/book-the-lakehouse"
COOKIE_PREFIX=book-the-lakehouse

Only FAMILY_PIN is needed for the PIN gate. DATABASE_URL enables the real database-backed calendar. BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN enables photos. BOOKING_COST_PER_NIGHT turns on the cost and bank-transfer prompt. MARY_IDS is a comma-separated list of person IDs for Marys, the admin users who can open /mary and check off paid stays.

Database Setup

This project uses Drizzle with Neon Postgres.

npm run db:generate
npm run db:push
npm run db:seed

src/lib/data.ts contains the starter people and bookings used by both demo mode and npm run db:seed. Swap them out for your own family, then seed again.

Run npm run db:push after pulling changes that add Mary mode, because bookings include a persisted payment_settled checklist field.

Useful database commands:

How It Is Organized

Scripts

npm run dev          # Start the local Next.js dev server
npm run build        # Build for production
npm run start        # Run the production build
npm run lint         # Run ESLint
npm run db:generate  # Generate Drizzle migrations
npm run db:push      # Push schema changes to DATABASE_URL
npm run db:seed      # Seed people and bookings from src/lib/data.ts

Tech Stack

Contributing

PRs are welcome, especially improvements that make the calendar easier for another family to adopt. Keep it small, private-by-default, and friendly to people who just want to book a weekend away without learning a new system.

License

MIT.