# turbo-start-brain

> Our open-source docs and knowledge base template. Next.js and Sanity in one monorepo, with search, an Ask AI assistant, and every page served as Markdown.

**Category:** starter | **License:** MIT | **Updated:** 2026-09-29

## Install

```bash
git clone https://github.com/robotostudio/turbo-start-brain.git
```

## Links

- Preview: https://turbo-start-brain.vercel.app
- Source: https://github.com/robotostudio/turbo-start-brain
- Related service: /services/sanity

---

## What it is

turbo-start-brain is the template we use for documentation and internal knowledge bases. It pairs a Next.js 16 docs site with Sanity Studio 6 in a single pnpm and Turborepo monorepo, on React 19 and Tailwind CSS v4. Every page, the navigation, and the site branding live in Sanity, so the people who write the docs can publish them without opening a pull request. You can see it running at [turbo-start-brain.vercel.app](https://turbo-start-brain.vercel.app).

Pages nest by slug, so `/engineering/stack` sits under `/engineering`, and the sidebar tree, breadcrumbs, and previous and next links are all built from that one structure. Move a page in Studio and the navigation follows. Change a slug and a redirect is created for the old URL.

It's also built to be read by AI tools, not just people. Any page can be fetched as Markdown by adding `.md` to the URL or sending `Accept: text/markdown`, and `/llms.txt` lists every page. That makes it a good source for coding agents and chat assistants that need your team's docs as context.

## What you get

- A docs layout with a collapsible sidebar, a table of contents that tracks the section on screen, and light, dark, and system themes.
- ⌘K search across titles, descriptions, and body text, running locally over your published docs with no external search service.
- An optional Ask AI dialog that answers only from a Sanity Context Knowledge Base and links each answer back to the page it came from.
- Markdown versions of every page, a "Copy as markdown" button, and a generated `llms.txt`.
- Page builder blocks for rich text and FAQ accordions, each with its own schema, query, component, Markdown serializer, and tests.
- Visual editing and Presentation, live preview, and redirects managed in Studio.

## How to use it

Clone the repo and install with pnpm. You'll need Node 22.12 or later and a Sanity account.

```bash
git clone https://github.com/robotostudio/turbo-start-brain.git
cd turbo-start-brain
corepack enable
pnpm install
```

Create a Sanity project, add a Viewer token as `SANITY_API_READ_TOKEN`, and add `http://localhost:3000` and `http://localhost:3333` as CORS origins with credentials allowed. Then copy the `.env.example` files in `apps/web` and `apps/studio` and run `pnpm dev`. The web app checks its environment on startup, so it won't run until the Sanity values are set.

## How we use it

We moved our own internal docs onto it, and it's where we start when a client needs a docs site or a knowledge base their team can edit. It shares its structure with [turbo-start-sanity](/tools/turbo-start-sanity), so anyone who has worked on one of our [Sanity builds](/services/sanity) will recognise the layout.