Description

The preview deploy seeded each PR's fresh Turso (libSQL) database by running pnpm seed:standalone with DATABASE_URI pointed at remote Turso. Payload's seed performs thousands of individual create() calls, and against a remote database each one is a network round-trip — so the step is latency-bound (~289s on ubuntu-latest, and long enough on higher-latency runners to lose the connection mid-seed).

This seeds into a local SQLite file instead, then bulk-imports that file into the fresh Turso preview DB in a single operation. The end state is identical — a fully seeded Turso preview DB — but the seed/import drops from ~5 min to seconds and no longer depends on sustained low-latency round-trips, so it's runner-agnostic.

Related Issues

Refs #1143

Key Changes

• Seed to a local file, in push mode. The seed step now targets file:./preview-seed.db and overrides NODE_ENV off production so the SQLite adapter runs in push mode and builds the current schema directly from the Payload config — the same fast path the CI build job uses.
  • Running migrations from zero isn't viable on this repo: the 20260505_..._backfill_document_references data migration reads collections via the Local API, whose query is built from the current config and references block tables (e.g. pages_blocks_form_embed) that a later migration adds — so on a fresh DB the query hits no such table and aborts. The old remote-Turso path would hit this too.
• Bulk-import with turso db create --from-dump (a sqlite3 .dump), reordered to run after the local seed. --from-dump is used rather than --from-file/db import, which require WAL mode and mis-parse valid WAL databases on sqlite3 ≥ 3.50 (tursodatabase/turso-cli#1030); a plain SQL dump is runner-agnostic.
• Removed the two remote-Turso steps (Run database migrations + Seed the database). Vercel env wiring, build, deploy, and aliasing are unchanged — the deployed preview still points at the populated Turso DB.
• Kept runs-on: ubuntu-latest; moving preview onto a Blacksmith runner is the trivial follow-up called out as out-of-scope in Speed up preview seeding: seed locally, then bulk-import to Turso #1143.

How to test

The preview workflow runs on this PR (opened/synchronize), so its own preview deployment is the end-to-end check: after the Preview environment is approved, confirm https://<ref>.preview.avy-fx.org comes up fully seeded (tenants, users, pages) and that the Seed a local SQLite database + Create the preview database from the seeded file steps complete in well under a minute.

Local verification performed while developing:

• Push-mode seed of a fresh local file → 4 tenants / 19 users / 112 pages.
• sqlite3 .dump (~1.5 MB) reloaded into a fresh DB preserves all 248 tables and identical row counts — a faithful proxy for Turso's --from-dump, which replays the same SQL. (A live Turso round-trip wasn't run locally; the PR's preview run exercises it for real.)

Screenshots / Demo video

n/a

Migration Explanation

No schema/migration changes — workflow-only.

Future enhancements / Questions

• Re-enable Blacksmith runners for the preview job (now that seeding is fast and runner-agnostic) — trivial follow-up per Speed up preview seeding: seed locally, then bulk-import to Turso #1143.

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