Townwick phase 0: one config file becomes a barbershop site

What shipped

A pnpm-11 workspace, and a site that builds itself out of one file.

@townwick/config-schema is the whole contract: Zod 4 rules for config.yaml, cross-field checks, E.164 phone normalization, and a build-time WCAG AA contrast check that prints the computed ratio in the error so you can see how far off you are. @townwick/theme ships the classic variant only, token-driven CSS with a typographic hero, a services grid, and an hours table whose open-now logic is plain DOM. @townwick/scripts has new-client, validate, and the cross-platform run wrapper. The site app builds exactly one client, picked by the CLIENT env var. CJ’s Barbershop is the seed. CI runs typecheck, validate, test and build, and there’s a committed gate script.

The whole point of phase 0 was to prove the shape: edit a YAML file, get a site. That part works.

Decisions

The four in the table all have the same flavor, which is why I’m glad we did a research round before writing code. Each one works fine on my machine today and breaks somewhere I’m not looking.

import.meta.url is the sharpest. It resolves fine in dev, then the Astro 7 production build relocates the loader module into dist/.prerender/chunks/ and the repo root is suddenly three directories off. process.cwd() is site/ in both, so it’s the boring correct answer.

The dependency calls went the same way. wcag-contrast hasn’t been touched since 2019 and all it does is 25 lines of arithmetic that hasn’t changed since WCAG 2.0, so I own the arithmetic. Phone numbers went the other direction: the obvious ^\+[1-9]\d{1,14}$ regex rejects every number a human would actually type and happily accepts numbers that don’t exist, so libphonenumber-js’s 82KB earns its place.

The dev wrapper is a Windows tax. CLIENT=x pnpm dev is a bash-ism, cross-env can’t take a positional slug, and documenting two invocations per shell is how you get a README nobody trusts.

What broke

Nothing at review, but two rounds of friction on the way there.

astro dev daemonizes now. It survives its parent process, so the wrapper needed a dev:stop before I spent an afternoon wondering why port 4321 was busy.

Zod 4 keeps running object-level checks after the inner fields have already failed. Every cross-field rule now guards against partially-parsed input, because without it a malformed hours block crashed the schema instead of reporting, which is the exact opposite of what a config contract is for.

pnpm 11 also dropped onlyBuiltDependencies, and its new 24-hour minimumReleaseAge default refuses same-day releases, so it refused the Astro version we’d just pinned until it was explicitly excluded.

Numbers

Review re-ran the whole battery on its own: install, typecheck, test, validate, gate, build and dev-smoke all exit 0. The gate is 18/18, and it got negative-proofed by mutating the seed phone number, which failed exactly 2 checks and exited 1, then restored byte-identical.

The contrast math was checked against reference values rather than trusted. #777777 on white is 4.4781 and fails AA, #767676 is 4.5422 and passes, black on white is 21 exactly.

Next

Phase 1 is the demo pipeline: Sharp photo ingest with stock placeholders, manual reviews rendering, the demo-stub contact form, noindex and robots behavior for demos, OG images, JSON-LD, Vercel wiring, and the test that actually matters, which is whether new-client untamed-salon gets to a deployed preview in under 30 minutes.