Introduction

Colony is a free React admin dashboard built on Ant Design v6, Vite 8 and TypeScript. MIT licensed, no attribution required.

Why it exists

Ant Design has around 3 million npm installs a week and one official admin template — Ant Design Pro. Pro is good, and using it means adopting UmiJS: its build scripts are literally max dev and max build.

Below Pro, the free tier is thin. At the time of writing the most active non-official option had 273 GitHub stars and was still on React 18.

Colony aims at the space between: everything Pro's routes give you, on tooling you already know.

What is in the box

• All 24 Ant Design Pro routes, under the same names
• Eight pages Pro has no equivalent for — kanban, calendar, inbox, files, notifications, audit log, billing, onboarding
• Theme Studio — live token editing with a WCAG contrast readout
• Command palette — ⌘K over every route and setting
• Visual access control — a permission matrix that drives menu, palette and guards
• A component gallery — every control, in the states you will meet them

What it deliberately does not do

• No UmiJS. Vite and React Router.
• No ProComponents. Its npm latest still declares antd 4/5 only.
• No prerelease dependencies anywhere in the tree.
• No @ant-design/x for the assistant page — ~85 kB for a message list and a composer did not justify itself against the budget.

Stack

Build	Vite 8 (Rolldown)
UI	Ant Design 6
Language	TypeScript 6, strict
Router	React Router 8
Server state	TanStack Query 5
Forms	React Hook Form + Zod 4
Client state	Zustand 5
Charts	Recharts 3
Mocking	MSW 2
i18n	i18next
Tests	Vitest · Playwright

TypeScript is on 6, not 7, because typescript-eslint still caps at <6.1.0 on every tag. For a template people fork, a lint setup that fails out of the box costs more than being one major behind.