Beam is a simple tool that allows members to write posts to share across your organization. Think of it like a lightweight internal blog. Features include a simple Markdown-based editor with preview, image drag and drop, comments and likes, search, a clean responsive layout with dark mode support, and an admin role for hiding posts.

Setup

Install dependencies

npm install

Create a database

• Create a PlanetScale database
• Create a connection string to connect to your database. Choose Prisma for the format
• Set up the environment variables:

cp .env.example .env

• Open .env and set the DATABASE_URL variable with the connection string from PlanetScale
• Create the database schema:

npx prisma db push

Configure authentication

By default Beam uses GitHub for authentication, but you can use Okta if you prefer.

• Create an OAuth app on GitHub (Note that a separate app must be created for production use)
  • Go to Developer Settings
  • Click on New OAuth App
  • For Callback URL, enter http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback/github
  • Once the app is created, click Generate a new client secret
• Set environment variables in .env
  • Set AUTH_PROVIDER to github
  • Set GITHUB_ID to the Client ID value
  • Set GITHUB_SECRET to the secret value generated above
  • Set GITHUB_ALLOWED_ORG to the GitHub organization name your Beam members must belong to
  • Set NEXTAUTH_SECRET to a random secret. This is a good resource.

Enable image uploads (optional)

To enable image uploads, set the environment variable NEXT_PUBLIC_ENABLE_IMAGE_UPLOAD to true.

Beam uses Cloudinary for storing uploaded images. You can sign up for a free account.

• On your Cloudinary dashboard, look for these values under your account settings: Cloud Name, API Key, API Secret.
• Update .env with the following variables:
  • CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME: Cloud Name
  • CLOUDINARY_API_KEY: API Key
  • CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET: API Secret

Running the app locally

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

Deploying to Vercel

One-click deploy:

⚠️ Remember to update your callback URLs after deploying.