Show HN: I made a CMS that uses Git to store your data

Gave it a shot and seems really nice and lightweight. Tried running it off the example blog but suddenly all the collections just disappeared. Even though everything was in git. Will keep trying it out but will obviously not do anything production worthy until it's a bit more stable and thoroughly tested.

The lack of options in this space really baffles me.<p>Statically generated websites are everywhere and have been popular for many years. Gatsby, Next, Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, Astro, etc.<p>Yet, there is a lack of visual editing interfaces for Markdown&#x2F;Frontmatter&#x2F;MDX content.<p>Netlify CMS has been the best solution in this space, and despite many thousands of stars it’s abandoned now.<p>Tina CMS seems nice, but requires a subscription&#x2F;cloud account.<p>Why are there not more alternatives?<p>Will take a closer look at Outstatic for sure.

This is awesome. I was looking for something similar (either fully static or a headless CMS) for using it on the Wasmer website blog [1], which is already using Next.js.<p>We&#x27;ll give it a try... thanks for the great work!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wasmerio&#x2F;wasmer.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wasmerio&#x2F;wasmer.io</a>

Does it directly (client side js) talk to github, or is there an intermediate layer like serverless functions involved?

I found something similar but more flexible while looking for alternatives: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frontaid.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frontaid.io&#x2F;</a>

I always thought it would be cool to have a FOSS project that was wiki-based. People could submit edits which would be run through CICD, and accepted automatically if they improved performance (after passing tests). Contributing to projects has certainly gotten easier since the pathches-to-mailing-list era but it could certainly have less friction. As well I think it would feel more &quot;competitive&quot; especially if you&#x27;re optimising individual functions (== wiki pages) for speed.

Congrats on building and shipping Outstatic :-)<p>I built something similar a fews back, mainly for myself: UI for creating&#x2F;editing content and generated static output. It fully integrated Git into the workflow and handled publishing to your own subdomain (free hosting). It was pretty minimalist but worked fairly well. Originally I built it for desktop, then later decided I needed it available anywhere and rebuilt it as a web app.<p>I eventually stopped working on it though because I ran into problems with the browser implementation of Git provided by the library Isomorphic-Git (it could only handle simple merges). I also stopped writing, and since I had no users besides myself I lacked motivation to resolve outstanding issues<p>The app still exists and even very recently it crossed my mind to revisit it. You might just have inspired me to do so.<p>Edit: fix typo

This sounds cool. We wrote a git-based CMS[0] that is a little different. It has a nice-enough UI for creating and editing markdown documents, which are stored in git. And then it has a JSON API so that your main site can fetch the content and style &#x2F; format however it likes. Users log in with OAuth or local passwords and their edits end up as git commits that are attributed to them.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;frameable&#x2F;junco-cms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;frameable&#x2F;junco-cms</a>

I think that it was very good idea to make post edit interface very similar to Wordpress one - plenty of people will be familiar with it right away!

Iirc netlify cms uses a similar way to store data?

The fact that you can update and check in a single page at a time seems to make svn without needing to pull the whole repo seems to make subversion rather well suited to wikis in my mind. Not to mention you don&#x27;t usually need the more advanced git or mercurial features.<p>I wonder if anyone has tried that.

Well done! How flexible is this when it comes to custom integrations such as custom previews, styles etc?

This is awesome, nice work. I was able to get an example deployed and working in a few minutes!

This is really cool. Not only is it great technically (combo of open source and git-powered is so convenient) - you’ve also done a stellar job of designing the UI. This looks like a CMS an individual would choose over others based on UX alone.

Looks amazing! Interesting to see the fully integrated approach. Working on gitpaper.com, which takes the bring-your-own-static-site-generator (byossg TM) route.<p>Really like the idea of keeping content in git, especially for smaller projects.

Does this mean that writers use a branch and merge based workflow?<p>That would be amazing and it is the one major thing missing from other options like Statamic.<p>Nobody understood my needs around this when I was looking for solutions.

Well done on getting such a good domain name. I like the idea too!

Cool concept.<p>Does anyone know of something like Datomic but that runs on top of Postgres? ie. Postgres + change history&#x2F;management.

love the design of this, nice work!

Looks nice but I am not sure how &quot;does not require signing up to a third party service&quot; is compatible with the get started page which starts with &quot;requires a github account and a vercel account&quot;

&quot;Own your data&quot;<p>But it seems to require a Github and a Vercel account: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outstatic.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;getting-started" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outstatic.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;getting-started</a>

A bit off-topic, but out of interest, I noticed your GitHub readme states the below, accompanied with a large GIF of showing someone how to press the star button:<p>&gt; The project is constantly improving with new changes being implemented on a daily basis. You can keep up by hitting the Star button!<p>I&#x27;m seeing this as a trend, but how does this actually work? Are you scraping user details from their profile pages, and are you sure that&#x27;s allowed? Are you using some mechanism in GitHub to update users that have starred? Without understanding the actual mechanism used to keep users up-to-date, as hinted, it feels like misleading users to gain stars.

The best CMS is your native filesystem and using web pages that are and use files.

Mine is always the same combination, but Apple Notes instead of GitHub[1].<p>So it&#x27;s Apple Notes, Next.js and Vercel.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;montaigne.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;montaigne.io</a>

You mean like gollum?

Anytime I see something that&#x27;s in JavaScript that doesn&#x27;t have to be, I immediately close the page.<p>There&#x27;s literally a hundred languages you can choose.

The right way to manage documentation is to have some kind of a wiki, not to use git.<p>Git is terrible at managing documentation, it was designed for her bazaar-style software projects like the Linux kernel, which is very much a completely different use case.<p>Now you can mostly use any technology to do anything du maybe this software is great but I wouldn&#x27;t mention git as more than an implementation detail personally.

Really glad to see this coming. Sharing my experience of using Git for rendering docs and blog at Iterative. We&#x27;ve build a similar engine for the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvc.org&#x2F;doc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvc.org&#x2F;doc</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iterative.ai&#x2F;blog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iterative.ai&#x2F;blog</a> (internally it&#x27;s Git + DVC for images + Gatsby + Markdown deployed on Heroku (only for APIs) + Cloudflare + S3).<p>It&#x27;s been working really great. GitHub PRs + preview applications give a very powerful collaboration &#x2F; review framework. It works extremely well for folks who understand Git &#x2F; GitHub enough - engineers, technical writers, etc.<p>It&#x27;s starts breaking unfortunately for the marketing team, less tech savvy folks. I was trying to find a solution CMS that would work for them, but haven&#x27;t seen so far something that would satisfy our needs. Two things that we are usually missing:<p>- we need a way for people to come and review it (ideally GitHub &#x2F; Notion &#x2F; GoogleDoc style). Where you would be able to comment on a line, suggest and edit, etc, etc - we need a way to handle assets better (using Git for blog was not scalable - started breaking the workflow). So far we ended up using DVC for this, but it complicates the workflow.<p>- there are merge conflicts that are happening - that&#x27;s not easy to resolve in CMS<p>Nonetheless, even a tool that would prepare and generate a PR using an online editor is already a very decent step to my mind. Eager to try the tool.

&gt; Uses Git to store your data<p>I think you meant &quot;Uses GitHub to store your data&quot;?<p>Git is not a data store but a version control system, it can&#x27;t store data. Data is stored on your disk or on your Git <i>server</i>. In the case of your CMS it seems like it requires GitHub specifically, other Git servers won&#x27;t work.