20 ms·

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

203 points by AndreVitorio 4y ago

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!

shivekkhurana 4y ago
I found something similar but more flexible while looking for alternatives: https://frontaid.io/ https://frontaid.io/
quickthrower2 4y ago
Well done on getting such a good domain name. I like the idea too!
sixhobbits 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Neat project. Can you eventually just make it optionally self hosted with say gitlab or other software that is "self hostable" ?
    - AndreVitorio 4y ago
      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.
      - stjohnswarts 4y ago
        Gotcha, what you have looks great nonetheless. Congratulations! I'm just one of those who likes self hosting on cloud based solutions.
- deleted 4y ago
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ssddanbrown 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Probably Github itself gives stargazers updates on what they starred
  - detaro 4y ago
    it doesn't
    - pzrsa 4y ago
      it does, if you visit the "For you" tab in your dashboard you should see new releases from repos you've starred.
- yebyen 4y ago
  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.
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spapas82 4y ago
Iirc netlify cms uses a similar way to store data?
syrusakbary 4y ago
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 https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer.io
- AndreVitorio 4y ago
  Awesome, let me know how it goes!
  - syrusakbary 4y ago
    Will do! Tomorrow we are trialing it :)
Y_Y 4y ago
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 4y ago
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- liveoneggs 4y ago
  Ever used fossil? https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
julvo 4y ago
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 4y ago
lagrange77 4y ago
Does it directly (client side js) talk to github, or is there an intermediate layer like serverless functions involved?
- AndreVitorio 4y ago
  Mainly client side. Some functions go through next's api folder.
tr3ntg 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Thank you! I really appreciate it :)
zoover2020 4y ago
Well done! How flexible is this when it comes to custom integrations such as custom previews, styles etc?
- AndreVitorio 4y ago
  You can build your frontend as you wish. It is still very early so previews are not yet a thing.
anonyme-honteux 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
dxchester 4y ago
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 https://github.com/frameable/junco-cms
preya2k 4y ago
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.
- britzkopf 4y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but i've recently been trying to decide on a cms service and it seems like there are too many options (strapi, prismic, contentful, ghost, cockpit, forestry, etc...) What am i missing here?
- lytedev 4y ago
  NetlifyCMS is abandoned?
  - kyrra 4y ago
    Check the commit history on the project. Last real commit was mid April.
  - preya2k 4y ago
    Yeah, they've also "officially" said this on their forums. See: https://answers.netlify.com/t/is-this-project-dead/70988 https://answers.netlify.com/t/is-this-project-dead/70988 https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/discussions/6503 https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/discussions/6503
    - netsharc 4y ago
      Geez the first few responses of that forum thread is just an exhausting read of "We've relayed your message to $SOMEWHERE_ELSE and we are waiting for a response.".
- seanwilson 4y ago
leerob 4y ago
This is awesome, nice work. I was able to get an example deployed and working in a few minutes!
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superkuh 4y ago
The best CMS is your native filesystem and using web pages that are and use files.
- deleted 4y ago
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jeksn 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
You mean like gollum?
- deleted 4y ago
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podviaznikov 4y ago
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 https://montaigne.io
- deleted 4y ago
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- phodo 4y ago
  Can you speak a bit more as to how you are extracting the data from Apple Notes / iCloud into next?
edmcnulty101 4y ago
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 4y ago
  What makes JavaScript such a terrible fit compared to the other 100 languages you have in mind?
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    Async by default. Promise chains. Strange unpredictable typing. Many more strange things. It was half ass browser language originally with improvements bolted on.
simjnd 4y ago
> 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.
- powera 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    Oh yeah didn't think about it this way, you're right my bad.
- simonhamp 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    You're right my bad
pzrsa 4y ago
love the design of this, nice work!
shcheklein 4y ago
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 https://dvc.org/doc and https://iterative.ai/blog 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.
olah_1 4y ago
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.
- simonhamp 4y ago
  Have you seen Gitamic? (https://statamic.com/addons/simonhamp/gitamic https://statamic.com/addons/simonhamp/gitamic) I'm planning to add branching and merging soon
- AndreVitorio 4y ago
  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.
nico 4y ago
Cool concept. Does anyone know of something like Datomic but that runs on top of Postgres? ie. Postgres + change history/management.
- refset 4y ago
  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/nearform/temporal_tables - https://github.com/xocolatl/periods https://github.com/xocolatl/periods - https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal - https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables I haven't used any of them but I work on https://xtdb.com https://xtdb.com which is also implementing SQL:2011's temporal features :)
- nikodotio 4y ago
  I believe datomic does theoretically run on top of Postgres. Do you mean something with sql query syntax?
  - grzm 4y ago
    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.
capitainenemo 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > update and check in a single page at a time Git also enables this, so I don't understand your point.
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    You can work on and commit your article page A all day long without having to update the rest of the wiki while your fellow author works on page B and does the same. Apparently git now has better narrow/shallow support though. Will have to check that piece out again. I wonder if the large file support is a bit less hackish now. It always felt like such a kludge compared to mercurial.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  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.
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    Ah? Narrow/shallow work well now? I can just grab one file and edit/check in without grabbing the rest or having history issues? Good to know. Had tried it a few years ago without success.
pxtail 4y ago
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 4y ago
  You're the first person to mention it! I love Wordpress, that's where a lot of the ideas for Outstatic came from.
juunpp 4y ago
"Own your data" But it seems to require a Github and a Vercel account: https://outstatic.com/docs/getting-started https://outstatic.com/docs/getting-started
- AndreVitorio 4y ago
  If you add code to Github and host it on Vercel, isn't ownership still yours?
  - juunpp 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
      - juunpp 4y ago
        I don't know how much you want to get into this, but since we're already on this topic: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/external-oauth-clients/ https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/external-oauth-clients/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/oauth2-provider/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/oauth2-provider/ NetlifyCMS allows you to define your own backends, and Gitea now has OAuth2 support. Should be able to adopt a similar strategy and allow Gitea to be used as a backend.
lnoir 4y ago
Congrats on building and shipping Outstatic :-) I built something similar a fews back, mainly for myself: UI for creating/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. 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 The app still exists and even very recently it crossed my mind to revisit it. You might just have inspired me to do so. Edit: fix typo

203 points by AndreVitorio 4y ago

shivekkhurana 4y ago

I found something similar but more flexible while looking for alternatives: https://frontaid.io/ https://frontaid.io/

quickthrower2 4y ago

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

sixhobbits 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Neat project. Can you eventually just make it optionally self hosted with say gitlab or other software that is "self hostable" ?
  - AndreVitorio 4y ago
    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.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      Gotcha, what you have looks great nonetheless. Congratulations! I'm just one of those who likes self hosting on cloud based solutions.
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ssddanbrown 4y ago

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 4y ago
Probably Github itself gives stargazers updates on what they starred
- detaro 4y ago
  it doesn't
  - pzrsa 4y ago
    it does, if you visit the "For you" tab in your dashboard you should see new releases from repos you've starred.
yebyen 4y ago
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.

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spapas82 4y ago

Iirc netlify cms uses a similar way to store data?

syrusakbary 4y ago

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 https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer.io

AndreVitorio 4y ago
Awesome, let me know how it goes!
- syrusakbary 4y ago
  Will do! Tomorrow we are trialing it :)

Y_Y 4y ago

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.

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liveoneggs 4y ago
Ever used fossil? https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

julvo 4y ago

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 4y ago

lagrange77 4y ago

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

AndreVitorio 4y ago
Mainly client side. Some functions go through next's api folder.

tr3ntg 4y ago

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 4y ago
Thank you! I really appreciate it :)

zoover2020 4y ago

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

AndreVitorio 4y ago
You can build your frontend as you wish. It is still very early so previews are not yet a thing.

anonyme-honteux 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

dxchester 4y ago

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 https://github.com/frameable/junco-cms

preya2k 4y ago

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.

britzkopf 4y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but i've recently been trying to decide on a cms service and it seems like there are too many options (strapi, prismic, contentful, ghost, cockpit, forestry, etc...) What am i missing here?
lytedev 4y ago
NetlifyCMS is abandoned?
- kyrra 4y ago
  Check the commit history on the project. Last real commit was mid April.
- preya2k 4y ago
  Yeah, they've also "officially" said this on their forums. See: https://answers.netlify.com/t/is-this-project-dead/70988 https://answers.netlify.com/t/is-this-project-dead/70988 https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/discussions/6503 https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/discussions/6503
  - netsharc 4y ago
    Geez the first few responses of that forum thread is just an exhausting read of "We've relayed your message to $SOMEWHERE_ELSE and we are waiting for a response.".
seanwilson 4y ago

leerob 4y ago

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

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superkuh 4y ago

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

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jeksn 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago

You mean like gollum?

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podviaznikov 4y ago

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 https://montaigne.io

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phodo 4y ago
Can you speak a bit more as to how you are extracting the data from Apple Notes / iCloud into next?

edmcnulty101 4y ago

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 4y ago
What makes JavaScript such a terrible fit compared to the other 100 languages you have in mind?
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  Async by default. Promise chains. Strange unpredictable typing. Many more strange things. It was half ass browser language originally with improvements bolted on.

simjnd 4y ago

> 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.

powera 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  Oh yeah didn't think about it this way, you're right my bad.
simonhamp 4y ago
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 4y ago
  You're right my bad

pzrsa 4y ago

love the design of this, nice work!

shcheklein 4y ago

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 https://dvc.org/doc and https://iterative.ai/blog 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.

olah_1 4y ago

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.

simonhamp 4y ago
Have you seen Gitamic? (https://statamic.com/addons/simonhamp/gitamic https://statamic.com/addons/simonhamp/gitamic) I'm planning to add branching and merging soon
AndreVitorio 4y ago
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.

nico 4y ago

Cool concept. Does anyone know of something like Datomic but that runs on top of Postgres? ie. Postgres + change history/management.

refset 4y ago
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/nearform/temporal_tables - https://github.com/xocolatl/periods https://github.com/xocolatl/periods - https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal - https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables I haven't used any of them but I work on https://xtdb.com https://xtdb.com which is also implementing SQL:2011's temporal features :)
nikodotio 4y ago
I believe datomic does theoretically run on top of Postgres. Do you mean something with sql query syntax?
- grzm 4y ago
  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.

capitainenemo 4y ago

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 4y ago
> update and check in a single page at a time Git also enables this, so I don't understand your point.
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  You can work on and commit your article page A all day long without having to update the rest of the wiki while your fellow author works on page B and does the same. Apparently git now has better narrow/shallow support though. Will have to check that piece out again. I wonder if the large file support is a bit less hackish now. It always felt like such a kludge compared to mercurial.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
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.
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  Ah? Narrow/shallow work well now? I can just grab one file and edit/check in without grabbing the rest or having history issues? Good to know. Had tried it a few years ago without success.

pxtail 4y ago

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 4y ago
You're the first person to mention it! I love Wordpress, that's where a lot of the ideas for Outstatic came from.

juunpp 4y ago

"Own your data" But it seems to require a Github and a Vercel account: https://outstatic.com/docs/getting-started https://outstatic.com/docs/getting-started

AndreVitorio 4y ago
If you add code to Github and host it on Vercel, isn't ownership still yours?
- juunpp 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - juunpp 4y ago
      I don't know how much you want to get into this, but since we're already on this topic: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/external-oauth-clients/ https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/external-oauth-clients/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/oauth2-provider/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/oauth2-provider/ NetlifyCMS allows you to define your own backends, and Gitea now has OAuth2 support. Should be able to adopt a similar strategy and allow Gitea to be used as a backend.

lnoir 4y ago

Congrats on building and shipping Outstatic :-) I built something similar a fews back, mainly for myself: UI for creating/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. 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 The app still exists and even very recently it crossed my mind to revisit it. You might just have inspired me to do so. Edit: fix typo