No documentation for this yet, but here's the PR to add the file system backend: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/pull/786
We have a lively community on Spectrum if you have questions: https://spectrum.chat/netlify-cms
In A CMS with no server and 18 lines of configurationdecaporg
decap-cms
JavaScript2015–2024
decaporg / decap-cms
decap-cms
A Git-based CMS for Static Site Generators
22Distinct people
29Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
19.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A Git-based CMS for Static Site Generators
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- directus/directus · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- strapi/strapi · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- marmelab/react-admin · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 1:57:11 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year29 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-09-29 01:49:30 UTC to 2024-12-08 06:44:12 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Documentation: decapcms.org
A CMS for static site generators. Give teams a simple way to edit and add content to any site built with a static site generator.
Decap CMS is the new name of Netlify CMS since February 2023.
Join us on Discord for community chat.
How It Works
Decap CMS is a single-page app that you pull into the /admin part of your site.
It presents a clean UI for editing content stored in a Git repository.
You setup a YAML config to describe the content model of your site, and typically
tweak the main layout of the CMS a bit to fit your own site.
When a user navigates to /admin/ they'll be prompted to log in, and once authenticated
they'll be able to create new content or edit existing content.
Read more about Decap CMS Core Concepts.
Installation and Configuration
Decap CMS can be used in two different ways.
A quick and easy install that requires a single HTML file and a configuration file. All CMS JavaScript and CSS are loaded from a CDN.
Learn more in the Quick Start Guide.
A complete, more advanced install that gives you more flexibility but requires a static site builder with a build system that supports npm packages.
Decap Turbo is a hosted backend for Decap CMS: editors log in with Turbo accounts, large collections load from a cache, and access is managed per site. Explore it at https://decapcms.org/turbo/.
Sponsors
Help support Decap CMS development by becoming a sponsor! Your contributions help us maintain and improve this open-source project.
Main Partner
Decap CMS is supported by our main partner PM.
Backers
Thank you for your support!
Contribute
New contributors are always welcome! Check out CONTRIBUTING.md to get involved.
Change Log
This project adheres to Semantic Versioning.
Every release is documented on the GitHub Releases page.
License
Decap CMS is released under the MIT License.
Please make sure you understand its implications and guarantees.
Expert Services
Get hands-on help from Decap experts and partners for onboarding, custom feature development, website development and premium support.
Explore expert services
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
10 sourcesDisclaimer: I work for Netlify
If you check out this blog post about one of our biggest customers, you can see that there are some non-static services involved (look for the list of 4 services all called Go<something>):
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/03/16/smashing-magazine-ju...
So - while I wouldn't say we're planning to become a DB host or anything - we are both open to providing some glue needed to bring some missing pieces together for static sites without vendor lock in (all of those are open source and you can run your own instances - they are also all being polished up right now so keep an eye on the one(s) that interest you)...and we are trying to enable other services we don't want to reinvent - things like auth0 and firebase - for interoperability with our service.
oh yeah, and we also open sourced a CMS that uses Git as a
Read the rest
backing store so your content editors won't have to learn markdown or git... https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms
So - we're not done yet :)
This comment is a huge exaggeration of the effort it takes. You don't even really need full xcode to run terminal on mac.
There's options like Netlify to use as CMS: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms
Hugo will run anywhere.
In Linux you don't need to install the distro's packaged version; source is where you should go.
There is an added difficulty, but it's not as painful as you make it seem.
In Ask HN: Do you suggest static site generators to your customers?I think this is a viable project - I've thought about doing something similar myself. How will you differentiate from Netlifly CMS, though?
https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms
In Ask HN: What are you working on?There is an open issue, if you have any insight in providing other APIs backend https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/issues/57
In Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflowsNot yet - there's an issue [0] for that in the GitHub repository [1].
[0]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/issues/57
[1]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms
In Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflowsYes - the CMS allows you to specify custom content types using the config (example at [0]), which can have a variety of fields. There's a variety of built-in fields, and you can create your own as well [1].
That said, the focus of the CMS team is mostly on online publishing right now - we're trying to make editing static sites accessible enough for everyday users and featureful enough for large publications. I'd love to hear more about your use case and what you were thinking about using Netlify CMS for - you can reply here, raise an issue at https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/, or contact me at ben@netlify.com if you'd like to speak privately.
[0]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/blob/master/example/c...
[1]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/blob/master/docs/exte...
In Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflowsThere's no built-in support for Hugo shortcodes that I'm aware of, but you can enter them into posts fine, as there's built-in support for arbitrary Markdown content. Depending on your use case, it might be possible to extend the editor with a new widget to do what you want, as well [0]. Feel free to start an issue at https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/ if you're interested further.
[0]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/blob/master/docs/exte...
In Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflowsUnfortunately, GitHub's API does not provide per-repo permissions, so in order to read/write to any repo, the CMS has to get permission to read/write to all of them. This is a fundamental limitation of the GitHub API [0] - we'd love to be able to request more fine-grained permissions. This is a pretty frequent complaint about any application built with GitHub's API.
The r/w access to public keys is specific to setting up continuous deployment from a GitHub repo to Netlify's static hosting service. You can read more about why Netlify requests those permissions for continuous deployment here: https://www.netlify.com/docs/github-permissions/.
While Netlify's continuous deployment is (obviously) the deployment strategy we recommend, you can use the CMS for any static site, as it's totally build/deploy agnostic. You can use the CMS to edit you
Read the rest
r content and then build that content with Hugo and host on a VPS if you wish. You can also use Netlify to host your content without continuous deployment - it supports updating content with both an in-browser interface and a REST API [1].
The CMS is entirely open source, so you're free to inspect or fork the code - you can find the repository at https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/
[0]: https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes
[1]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/api/
The output is very flexible - you can define entry types as collections of "widgets", which would include stuff like a title, a cover image, a markdown body, etc. It's designed so you can use it as a CMS for almost any static site generator by defining how your data looks in the config - see https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/blob/master/example/c... for an example config (this is a configuration for the in-memory, non-persistent backend which we use for testing and demonstration).
In Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflows