Payload Configuration

payload/config.ts holds your site's metadata, URL behaviour, and theme. It is deliberately small — pages come from the filesystem, not from here.

Minimum viable config

import { Payload } from '@/lib/payload/types';

export const payload: Payload = {
  global: {
    title: 'My Wiki',
    description: 'My personal knowledge base',
  },
};

export default payload;

That is a complete, working site. Everything else is optional.

global

Required

Behaviour

global: {
  urlStrategy: 'path',     // 'path' | 'hash'   — default 'path'
  autoNavigation: true,    // boolean           — default true
}

• urlStrategy — whether URLs mirror the content tree or are hashed. See URL Strategies.
• autoNavigation — whether pages under content/ are discovered and added to the sidebar without being listed. See Navigation Configuration.

Presentation and SEO

global: {
  favicon: '/favicon.svg',
  baseUrl: 'https://mywiki.com',
  seo: {
    openGraph: {
      title: 'My Wiki — Knowledge Base',
      description: 'My personal knowledge base',
      images: [{ url: '/og-image.png', width: 1200, height: 630, alt: 'My Wiki' }],
    },
    twitter: {
      card: 'summary_large_image',
      site: '@myhandle',
    },
  },
}

• favicon — path to a file in public/
• baseUrl — used for canonical URLs, the sitemap, and Open Graph tags. Set it before you publish; social previews and robots.txt depend on it.

Individual pages override the title, description, and OG image through their Frontmatter.

navigation

Optional. Omit it and the sidebar is built from content/. Provide it to control naming and ordering — see Navigation Configuration for the full picture.

theme

theme: {
  primary: '#2563eb',      // Links and accents
  secondary: '#7c3aed',    // Secondary accent
  background: '#ffffff',   // Page background
  text: '#1f2937',         // Body text
  sidebarBg: '#f9fafb',    // Sidebar background
  codeBg: '#f3f4f6',       // Inline code background
}

Every field is optional and falls back to the default palette. Colours must be six-digit hex. See Theme Customization.

Validation

The config is checked against a JSON Schema before every build:

npm run validate:payload

It catches missing required fields, malformed colours, and an invalid urlStrategy. It runs automatically as the first step of npm run build, so a broken config fails immediately rather than partway through rendering.

Environment variables

global: {
  baseUrl: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL || 'http://localhost:3000',
}

The config is ordinary TypeScript, so anything available at build time works.

Types

Payload is fully typed, so your editor will autocomplete fields, flag typos, and show the documentation for each option inline. If a field is not in the type, it is not a real option.

Next

• Navigation Configuration — how the sidebar is assembled
• Theme Customization — colours and appearance
• Frontmatter — per-page settings