A Ready-Made Admin Dashboard Built with Shadcn UI and Vite That Will Save You Time at Startup

Every time you start a new pet project or internal utility, you have to rebuild the same interface from scratch. Sidebar, dark mode toggle, global search, responsive mobile layout. This routine takes days. The repository author shadcn-admin frequently encountered this task at work and decided to put together a universal template for themselves. As a result, the project has gathered over 13 thousand stars on GitHub.

What's Under the Hood

The project is built on a modern and fast tech stack. Vite serves as the build tool, and the entire codebase is written in TypeScript. Styling is handled by TailwindCSS in combination with Radix UI. This is the classic foundation for Shadcn UI.

An interesting choice was made in favor of TanStack Router for routing. Unlike the standard React Router, it provides strict typing of paths and parameters out of the box. For icons, the author chose Lucide and partially Tabler Icons. For authentication, the Clerk service is integrated into the project.

What Makes This Dashboard Interesting

The repository includes over a dozen pre-built pages. There are ready-made screens for users, settings, errors, and analytics.

Key features of this build:

• Full dark and light theme support.
• Command palette for searching across the entire application via keyboard shortcut.
• Pre-built sidebar component that collapses properly on mobile screens.
• RTL mode support for right-to-left languages.

RTL support is quite rare in free templates. To achieve proper element display when switching text direction, the author had to manually modify some of the base Shadcn components.

Important Consideration When Working with Components

If you plan to use this project as a base and update the UI kit through the CLI tool npx shadcn@latest add, be careful. Some components here have been modified.

The following files have been modified:

• scroll-area
• sonner
• separator

Additionally, the following elements have been updated for RTL support: dialog, select, table, sheet, sidebar, command, and switch. Automatic updates through the Shadcn CLI will simply overwrite these files with default versions. The author's custom modifications and RTL support will be lost in the process. To preserve changes, you'll need to merge the files manually.

How to Run the Project Locally

You'll need Node.js and the pnpm package manager to get started. Installation takes just a couple of minutes.

git clone https://github.com/satnaing/shadcn-admin.git
cd shadcn-admin
pnpm install
pnpm run dev

After that, the local server will launch the application, and you'll be able to immediately experience Vite's speed and the smooth page transitions.

Who This Repository Is For

The author honestly states in the description that this repository wasn't intended as an official starter. Nevertheless, the project is an excellent fit for that purpose.

This is a solid choice if you need to quickly deploy an admin panel for your own service and want to avoid dealing with heavy libraries like Ant Design. The codebase also serves as a useful reference for structuring TanStack Router and Shadcn UI components in a moderately complex React application.