Embed CMS

A headless CMS for Node.js: describe your content in JavaScript files, get an admin app, a REST API and a JavaScript API

You describe your content in plain JavaScript files, one per resource, and Embed CMS gives you three things from them: an admin app where editors write and translate that content, a REST API that serves it to your sites and apps, and a JavaScript API for your own server code.

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It keeps your content in a LevelDB database on disk by default, so there is no database server to set up; SQLite, MongoDB and PostgreSQL are there when you need them (how they compare). It runs on its own or inside an existing Express app, handles translations, images and files, users and rights, and can keep several servers in step.

Try it in five minutes

You need Node.js 24 and git.

git clone https://github.com/xiaodoudou/embed-cms.git embed-cms
cd embed-cms
npm install          # also builds the admin app into dist/, the first time
npm start

Open http://localhost:9990/admin and sign in with localAdmin / localAdmin when the browser asks. The menu already holds a catalogue of example resources, one per family of field types (see resources/). Click around: everything you see there is generated from the files in resources/.

The first start writes a cms.json with the default settings and a data/ folder with your content. Stop the server with Ctrl+C.

Your first resource

Say you want to publish articles, in English and Chinese. Create resources/articles.js:

module.exports = {
  displayname: 'Articles',
  group: 'Content',
  locales: ['enUS', 'zhCN'],
  schema: [
    { field: 'title', input: 'string', label: 'Title', required: true },
    { field: 'slug', input: 'transliterate', label: 'Slug', localised: false, unique: true, options: { valueFrom: 'title' } },
    { field: 'body', input: 'wysiwyg', label: 'Body' },
    { field: 'cover', input: 'image', label: 'Cover', localised: false, options: { maxCount: 1 } }
  ]
}

Restart npm start. Articles now appears in the menu under Content, with a tab per language, a rich-text editor and an image drop zone. Write an article and save it.

The same content is already on the REST API:

curl -u localAdmin:localAdmin http://localhost:9990/api/articles

[{ "title": { "enUS": "Hello", "zhCN": "你好" }, "slug": "hello", "body": { "enUS": "<p>…</p>" },
   "_id": "muosrfetmuosr8shy000gql4", "_createdAt": 1790814577349, "_updatedAt": 1790814577349 }]

And you can write to it the same way:

curl -u localAdmin:localAdmin -X POST http://localhost:9990/api/articles \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "title": { "enUS": "Second post" }, "slug": "second-post" }'

That's the whole loop: describe a resource, edit it in the admin, read it over the API. The getting started guide takes it further: putting embed-cms inside your own Express app, letting everyone read the articles without a password, relations between resources, and going to production.

Before you go to production

Two things in this quick start are only fit for your laptop. The localAdmin account has a published password (the server logs an error at every start until you change it), and cms.json holds secrets whose default values are published too. Run with NODE_ENV=production and follow SECURITY.md: production mode refuses to start with those defaults.

Documentation

docs/README.md is the map of the documentation. The pages you'll want first:

• Getting started: from the quick start to a real project.
• Concepts: resources, fields, locales, attachments, users and groups, in plain words.
• Field types: every input type, with screenshots.
• Configuration and API: the references.
• Storage engines: LevelDB, SQLite, JSON file, MongoDB or PostgreSQL, with benchmarks and what a crash loses.
• Examples: runnable projects to learn from, each written as a tutorial. A blog (the shortest site), a bilingual magazine, a docs platform with pages for members and a CMS kept off the public site, Boardwalk (a Vue 3 task board over the REST API), and Docker (running it in a container with every secret in a .env).

Contributing, security, license

Setting up a development copy, running the tests and writing commits: CONTRIBUTING.md. Reporting a vulnerability: SECURITY.md. What changed in each version, and what is coming: CHANGELOG.md.

Authors: Edouard Durand, Hugo Barbier. Released under the GNU GPL, version 3 only; versions up to 2.6.1 were MIT, and their notice is kept in the license file.