[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a CMS that uses Git to store your data
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Show HN: I made a CMS that uses Git to store your data
I'm excited to finally launch Outstatic, an open source static
website CMS that doesn't require a complicated setup or signing up
to a third-party service! You can access the documentation here:
Outstatic Documentation. I invite you to start by deploying our
example blog to Vercel and giving it a try. I think you'll be
pleasantly surprised at how easy and fun it is to use Outstatic.
Please, let me know what you think. This is the first public
version of the project and all feedback is welcome. If you dig the
project feel free to leave a star on Github. I appreciate your
support!
Author : AndreVitorio
Score : 158 points
Date : 2022-10-23 10:58 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (outstatic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (outstatic.com)
| olah_1 wrote:
| Does this mean that writers use a branch and merge based
| workflow?
|
| That would be amazing and it is the one major thing missing from
| other options like Statamic.
|
| Nobody understood my needs around this when I was looking for
| solutions.
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Right now Outstatic pushes straight to your main branch. I
| built it for personal use so I didn't get that far, but you are
| not the first to suggest this.
|
| If you want to chat about how this may work in terms of UI/UX,
| please let me know. I think the idea is interesting. I'm
| @AndreVitorio on twitter.
| simonhamp wrote:
| Have you seen Gitamic?
| (https://statamic.com/addons/simonhamp/gitamic)
|
| I'm planning to add branching and merging soon
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Does it directly (client side js) talk to github, or is there an
| intermediate layer like serverless functions involved?
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Mainly client side. Some functions go through next's api
| folder.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| Well done! How flexible is this when it comes to custom
| integrations such as custom previews, styles etc?
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| You can build your frontend as you wish. It is still very early
| so previews are not yet a thing.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| 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:
|
| > The project is constantly improving with new changes being
| implemented on a daily basis. You can keep up by hitting the Star
| button!
|
| I'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'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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Probably Github itself gives stargazers updates on what they
| starred
| detaro wrote:
| it doesn't
| pzrsa wrote:
| it does, if you visit the "For you" tab in your dashboard
| you should see new releases from repos you've starred.
| [deleted]
| yebyen wrote:
| Misleading users for GitHub stars... that's a paddling!
|
| Maybe it's like the YouTube Like and Subscribe, except for the
| part where they contact you for new releases. It's a lot less
| pushy to tell people to star your repo than asking them to
| subscribe to issues and become a contributor on equal footing.
|
| You need something like "stars" or "project member" as part of
| your contributor ladder.
|
| Did you know that YouTube channels cannot get a non-randomized
| URL or be searchable by the channel title unless you have 1000
| subs? (How do you get 1000 subs when nobody can search for or
| find your channel unless you hand them a link? I guess by
| pounding pavement...)
|
| As an OSS maintainer, I don't think that stars do anything
| except for number go up, but you'd be surprised the things that
| "number go up" can help with.
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how it works but on my Github
| feed I think I get updates from products I star. This is my
| first open source project and I saw some other popular projects
| doing it. I'm basically using it to measure interest in the
| idea/project so that I can decide to pursue working on it
| publicly or just keep it for myself.
| paulgb wrote:
| YMMV, but the "For You (beta)" tab on GitHub shows releases on
| repos I've starred (but not followed). The "Following" tab does
| not.
| city41 wrote:
| It did, and for a while my following tab was flooded with
| updates from repos I've starred. I've starred so many repos
| over the years it made it impossible to see updates related
| to my stuff. I think that is why the For You was created, I
| assume people complained.
| vidyesh wrote:
| The For you feed [1] _(currently in beta)_ supposedly does
| that, one of the things it will populate with is, updates about
| your starred repos.
|
| [1]https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-
| an...
| [deleted]
| nico wrote:
| Cool concept.
|
| Does anyone know of something like Datomic but that runs on top
| of Postgres? ie. Postgres + change history/management.
| nikodotio wrote:
| I believe datomic does theoretically run on top of Postgres.
|
| Do you mean something with sql query syntax?
| grzm wrote:
| The on-prem version can use PostgreSQL as a backing store,
| but it's essentially blob storage of serialized data: the
| schema in Postgres isn't the logical representation of the
| corresponding Datomic schema.
| refset wrote:
| One of these Postgres-based implementations of SQL:2011's
| temporal versioning might get you close enough:
|
| - https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables
|
| - https://github.com/xocolatl/periods
|
| - https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal
|
| - https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables
|
| I haven't used any of them but I work on https://xtdb.com which
| is also implementing SQL:2011's temporal features :)
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| The right way to manage documentation is to have some kind of a
| wiki, not to use git.
|
| 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.
|
| Now you can mostly use any technology to do anything du maybe
| this software is great but I wouldn't mention git as more than an
| implementation detail personally.
| preya2k wrote:
| I totally disagree. Git is a great way to store documentation.
| Also ,,Git" and ,,Wiki" are not opposites. You can have a wiki
| AND store content in git at the same time.
| anonyme-honteux wrote:
| Great in which sense? I would argue that git is easy because
| you are already familiar with it, but it doesn't make shared
| documentation simple. How could he do that? Do you think that
| Linus Torvalds had a use case similar to Wikipedia in mind
| when he designed git? Sure you could build Wikipedia on top
| of git, it would just be shitload of unnecessary suffering
| compared to the hipster technology called PHP+MySQL.
| spapas82 wrote:
| Iirc netlify cms uses a similar way to store data?
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Anytime I see something that's in JavaScript that doesn't have to
| be, I immediately close the page.
|
| There's literally a hundred languages you can choose.
| randomguy0 wrote:
| What makes JavaScript such a terrible fit compared to the other
| 100 languages you have in mind?
| syrusakbary wrote:
| 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.
|
| We'll give it a try... thanks for the great work!
|
| [1]: https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer.io
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Awesome, let me know how it goes!
| superkuh wrote:
| The best CMS is your native filesystem and using web pages that
| are and use files.
| [deleted]
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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
| "competitive" especially if you're optimising individual
| functions (== wiki pages) for speed.
| [deleted]
| jeksn wrote:
| 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.
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Hey, Thanks for trying it out!
|
| Yes, at this stage I wouldn't advise anyone to try using this
| in production, it's the first version of a side project after
| all. But I'm really surprised by the response so far. I'll
| definitely keep improving it.
|
| Let me know if you manage to figure out what went wrong, and if
| you get any error messages/logs. I'm available on twitter
| @AndreVitorio
| fny wrote:
| You mean like gollum?
| [deleted]
| simjnd wrote:
| > Uses Git to store your data
|
| I think you meant "Uses GitHub to store your data"?
|
| Git is not a data store but a version control system, it can't
| store data. Data is stored on your disk or on your Git _server_.
| In the case of your CMS it seems like it requires GitHub
| specifically, other Git servers won 't work.
| simonhamp wrote:
| This is so unbelievably wrong.
|
| Git absolutely is a data store. It just so happens that its
| primary use-case is version-controlled code.
|
| There's no reason why it can't be other data - even binary.
| Other text that isn't code is absolutely fine.
|
| Also, if it's in GitHub, it's almost certainly is using Git.
| Though I haven't tried this service out yet, my guess is GitHub
| is being used as a known central Git repo source with a
| reasonably well developed ecosystem and security mechanics as
| well as being the most widely adopted Git VCS platform on the
| market.
|
| But in theory you could use any Git repo on any platform (or no
| platform)... it sounds like it will just need to end up on
| GitHub currently to make use of the orchestration this service
| provides.
| simjnd wrote:
| You're right my bad
| powera wrote:
| > Git is not a data store but a version control system, it
| can't store data. Data is stored on your disk
|
| By the same theory, you don't store data in MySQL, you store it
| on a disk.
| simjnd wrote:
| Oh yeah didn't think about it this way, you're right my bad.
| dxchester wrote:
| 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 /
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/frameable/junco-cms
| pzrsa wrote:
| love the design of this, nice work!
| podviaznikov wrote:
| Mine is always the same combination, but Apple Notes instead of
| GitHub[1].
|
| So it's Apple Notes, Next.js and Vercel.
|
| [1] https://montaigne.io
| phodo wrote:
| Can you speak a bit more as to how you are extracting the data
| from Apple Notes / iCloud into next?
| [deleted]
| preya2k wrote:
| The lack of options in this space really baffles me.
|
| Statically generated websites are everywhere and have been
| popular for many years. Gatsby, Next, Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, Astro,
| etc.
|
| Yet, there is a lack of visual editing interfaces for
| Markdown/Frontmatter/MDX content.
|
| Netlify CMS has been the best solution in this space, and despite
| many thousands of stars it's abandoned now.
|
| Tina CMS seems nice, but requires a subscription/cloud account.
|
| Why are there not more alternatives?
|
| Will take a closer look at Outstatic for sure.
| varispeed wrote:
| I wonder how people deal with a situation where they build a
| platform like this and it gets adopted by e.g. political group
| opposing current regime in their country. A friend of mind
| built a pretty nice platform, until these groups started using
| it. He just didn't want to end up in the ditch somewhere so he
| closed the platform. The money from ads wouldn't even pay for
| servers, not to mention legal aid or hiring staff to deal with
| "unwanted" content. Even if you build an open source platform
| that anyone can self host, you can still run a risk someone
| being upset about it, that you are making it "easy" for certain
| groups to spread their propaganda.
|
| It feels like today it is a too risky water to dip toes into.
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| When I started building Outstatic I haven't had heard about
| Netlify CMS, Tina CMS, nor any other alternatives... thought I
| was being original with the idea of a UI to manage .md files on
| Git lol
|
| After I've launched people pointed the existence of those CMSs.
| I really built this as something to scratch my own itch,
| halfway through I decided it could be a library.
|
| But as someone else mentioned, it's quite hard to think of a
| business model around this. I'll keep working on it just so
| that I can use it in my own blog. If other people want to use
| it, that's great.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Wordpress _dominates_ the space, despite its record of security
| issues.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| UX is the hardest thing. Drag and drop sucks IMO. Nothing that
| non-technical folks actually love, mostly be forced to use what
| orgs bought. for data entry, nothing beats spreadsheet .. I'm
| crying.
| lytedev wrote:
| NetlifyCMS is abandoned?
| kyrra wrote:
| Check the commit history on the project. Last real commit was
| mid April.
| preya2k wrote:
| Yeah, they've also "officially" said this on their forums.
|
| See: https://answers.netlify.com/t/is-this-project-dead/70988
| https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/discussions/6503
| jupiter90000 wrote:
| Crafter CMS is a git backed CMS. https://craftercms.org/
| seanwilson wrote:
| > Netlify CMS has been the best solution in this space, and
| despite many thousands of stars it's abandoned now.
|
| I've noticed this too (https://github.com/netlify/netlify-
| cms/releases) with lots of open issues which makes me very
| nervous about using it for client projects. Netlify CMS is more
| than good enough for solo and small sites but it feels like it
| never took off like it should even with the backing of Netlify.
| Netlify's recent pricing changes to their hosting where they
| charge per Git user who trigger commits isn't great here
| either.
|
| > Why are there not more alternatives?
|
| Maybe it's hard to make money from? There's quite a few
| commercial offerings where some try to offer a slice of it as
| open source.
|
| I'd love an active open source alternative to WordPress with a
| basic site builder i.e. you can drag and drop pre-built page
| sections to create new pages and get a live preview before you
| deploy. Unfortunately, WordPress is still the safe open source
| choice for ease-of-use of the editors for basic business sites.
| simonhamp wrote:
| For the PHP folks there are a few options.
|
| Ones that I've used include:
|
| - Statamic https://statamic.com
|
| - Jigsaw https://jigsaw.tighten.com/
| pdoub wrote:
| For anyone wanting to dig deeper, I think the term "flat file
| CMS" has been coined quite a while ago (and is what the author
| is aiming at with the Git-based flow). I'd agree that "lack of
| options for (accessible) visual editing UIs" is true, while
| flat-file-, database- or API-powered (which in the end is a
| wrapper over a DB, usually) CMS seem to exist for any
| reasonably popular programming language - with different levels
| of maintenance/recent development happening, granted.
| preya2k wrote:
| What OP is building is not a typical "flat file CMS".
|
| Flat File CMS are typical CMS systems (often times written in
| PHP) that run on the server, but use files (often
| Markdown/Frontmatter) as their data backend (instead of a DB
| like Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) - if you're looking for a
| really nice Flat File CMS take a look at Kirby
| (https://getkirby.com) or Statamic.
|
| What OP is building (I think) and what others like Netlify
| CMS and Tina CMS do, are Frontend Applications (typically
| SPA) that output a set of content files, which can then be
| fed into a static site generator (like Next.js, Astro, Hugo,
| Jekyll), which will built a website from it. Often these
| content files live on Git - so the common interface between a
| SSG and the "static CMS" is often Git (or a local folder on
| your file system). So it's a "smaller" concept than flat file
| CMS. Typically these "static CMS" only care about content and
| have nothing to do with templating, etc.
| [deleted]
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| Can't believe Netlify CMS has been dropped. That was a really
| smart little project. For sites of a certain size (which seems
| to be a great number of webapps), it's an almost ideal
| solution. Hope any fork picks up sufficient traction.
|
| Bugs do appear to still be tracked and tagged though, so it's a
| confusing state of affairs.
| pxtail wrote:
| 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!
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| You're the first person to mention it! I love Wordpress, that's
| where a lot of the ideas for Outstatic came from.
| julvo wrote:
| 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.
|
| Really like the idea of keeping content in git, especially for
| smaller projects.
| breck wrote:
| juunpp wrote:
| "Own your data"
|
| But it seems to require a Github and a Vercel account:
| https://outstatic.com/docs/getting-started
| jstanley wrote:
| But the HN post says:
|
| > doesn't require a complicated setup or signing up to a third-
| party service!
| [deleted]
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| If you add code to Github and host it on Vercel, isn't
| ownership still yours?
| juunpp wrote:
| Seeing that Github is exploiting FOSS for its own commercial
| interests and possibly violating licenses (Copilot), it's not
| exactly the kind of ownership that I envision when somebody
| says "own your data".
|
| Don't know much about Vercel, but I'd be skeptical.
|
| I think it'd be an improvement over this project to make
| those dependencies optional. For example, if I wanted to
| self-host. I'm using NetlifyCMS for a project and I agree
| with others that the whole space could use a bit of
| innovation.
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| In my opinion, code I add to Github is still mine. Guess
| we'll have to agree to disagree here.
|
| Self-hosting would be awesome indeed, but I think doing it
| would be quite complicated because of the authentication
| part, which is needed to push changes to a git provider.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| What is "your data".
|
| Is it (a) "Your Content", (b) all the data that Github gets
| from hosting "Your Content" or (c) both.
|
| With respect to people who upload data to Github, under the
| Github Terms of Service, specifically the license that these
| people grant to Github, there is almost nothing that Github
| cannot do with "Your Content".^1^2
|
| Anything that falls under "applications, software, products and
| services" is fair game. If the product is [whatever], they have
| granted Github a license to use their content for it. If the
| service is [whatever], they have granted Github a license to
| use their content for it. No one knows what products or
| services Microsoft may choose to pursue through Github in the
| future.
|
| 1. The one potential prohibition is the sale of "Your Content."
| But, as in the case of Facebook, it would make little sense to
| sell user generated content. It is the company's largest asset.
| Of course, nothing prohibits Github from giving away or
| otherwise transferring Your Content to a third party, not as
| part of a sale. As long as this activity is part of
| "applications, software, products or services" offered by
| Github, it is permitted. As above, that could be anything, and
| we have no way to predict what Microsoft may choose to do in
| the future.
|
| 2. However Github is explicitly permitted to transfer "Your
| Content" to "partners" such as Internet
| Archive Software Heritage The Long Now
| piql Stanford University Bodleian Libraries
| GH Torrent GH Archive Microsoft Research
| Bibliotheca-Alexandrina
|
| We have no idea what if any terms Github requires of its
| partners with respect to "Your Content".
|
| You may have no direct relationship with those partners and
| thus no means of limiting what they can do with "Your Content".
|
| To be truthful, some of those partners may have fewer
| commercial incentives than Microsoft, hence the risk of
| objectionable uses may be lower. But then we are left wondering
| why Microsoft needs to be an intermediary between the content
| owners and the "partners" who can store Your Content for future
| generations, at no cost to you, e.g., Internet Archive.
|
| No doubt, by acting as an (unnecessary) intermediary, sitting
| in between "Your Content" and anyone who wishes to access it,
| Microsoft is collecting and generating vast amounts of data
| that fall outside of "Your Content". Obviously, this data is
| outside of your control. Do you "own" it.
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Interesting. Thanks for the info. Ownership of data can be
| tricky, if you consider things like Google cache and the
| Internet Archive, then anything you make public on the
| internet isn't really yours.
| shcheklein wrote:
| Really glad to see this coming. Sharing my experience of using
| Git for rendering docs and blog at Iterative. We've build a
| similar engine for the https://dvc.org/doc and
| https://iterative.ai/blog (internally it's Git + DVC for images +
| Gatsby + Markdown deployed on Heroku (only for APIs) + Cloudflare
| + S3).
|
| It's been working really great. GitHub PRs + preview applications
| give a very powerful collaboration / review framework. It works
| extremely well for folks who understand Git / GitHub enough -
| engineers, technical writers, etc.
|
| It'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't seen so far something that would
| satisfy our needs. Two things that we are usually missing:
|
| - we need a way for people to come and review it (ideally GitHub
| / Notion / 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.
|
| - there are merge conflicts that are happening - that's not easy
| to resolve in CMS
|
| 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.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| 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't usually need the more advanced git or mercurial
| features.
|
| I wonder if anyone has tried that.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _update and check in a single page at a time_
|
| Git also enables this, so I don't understand your point.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Not only that, but SVN (mod_dav_svn) is the reference, or only,
| implementation for full-featured WebDAV, an HTTP extension
| protocol for resource-/file-based CMS to live at the same
| endpoint as your site. Though git doesn't require a full clone
| anymore for access to a single file since about two years.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Well done on getting such a good domain name. I like the idea
| too!
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Looks nice but I am not sure how "does not require signing up to
| a third party service" is compatible with the get started page
| which starts with "requires a github account and a vercel
| account"
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| You're right. What I meant is, you don't need a third-party CMS
| provider. I suck at writing copy.
|
| Some people have been using Outstatic without Vercel, and
| there's a section in the FAQs about it. But since this is the
| first version of the library and I haven't tested it with other
| services, I felt putting Vercel as a requirement would avoid
| people running into pitfalls with other services.
|
| But oAuth is only setup with Github for now. So unfortunately
| that's pretty much a requirement.
|
| I plan on adding support for other git providers in the future.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Neat project. Can you eventually just make it optionally self
| hosted with say gitlab or other software that is "self
| hostable" ?
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Thanks. I think it can be done. But right now I'm mainly
| focusing on making this stable enough with the current
| Github setup before moving on to supporting other
| alternatives.
| [deleted]
| leerob wrote:
| This is awesome, nice work. I was able to get an example deployed
| and working in a few minutes!
| tr3ntg wrote:
| 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.
| AndreVitorio wrote:
| Thank you! I really appreciate it :)
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-10-23 23:01 UTC)