Building without a DB connection

One of the most common problems when building a site for production, especially with Docker - is the DB connection requirement.

The important note is that Payload by itself does not have this requirement, But Next.js' SSG does if any of your route segments have SSG enabled (which is default, unless you opted out or used a Dynamic API) and use the Payload Local API.

Solutions:

You can run Next.js build using the pnpx next build --experimental-build-mode compile command to only compile the code without static generation, which does not require a DB connection. In that case, your pages will be rendered dynamically, but after that, you can still generate static pages using the pnpx next build --experimental-build-mode generate command when you have a DB connection.

Next.js documentation

You can opt out of SSG by adding this all the route segment files:

Note that it will disable static optimization and your site will be slower. More on Next.js documentation