Introduction
A composable, block-based headless CMS with Git-like versioning and an end-to-end type-safe API.
@createcms/core is a headless CMS you define in code. You declare your content as typed collections of blocks, generate a database schema from those definitions, and get a fully type-safe server API and client in return. It is built on better-call and Drizzle ORM (PostgreSQL).
Work in progress — not production-ready. createCMS is pre-1.0, under active development, and has not been tested in production. Expect breaking changes and bugs; use it for prototypes, not production. Pin an exact version.
Why it exists
Building apps and sites with Next.js, every CMS got in the way: some missing features, some bloated, most painful to customize, and there was the constant split between an app and its marketing site (pay a headless CMS for traffic, or run a separate one somewhere). But your app already owns its data and has a database, so why not put the CMS inside it? @createcms/core is a CMS you install from npm and integrate natively, shaped to exactly what a project needs, instead of squeezing your app into someone else's CMS.
The requirements were specific, and most came from real agency work: instant rollbacks, full history, approval flows, and several versions of a page live at once (A/B testing had long been an unsatisfying patchwork of separate systems, privacy headaches, and performance hits). Those needs look a lot like version control, so the model is Git, implemented in PostgreSQL.
What makes it different
Your collection definitions are the single source of truth. They drive the database schema, the write API, the shape of read responses, and the client, so there are no hand-written types to keep in sync. Content is stored with Git-like versioning: every entry is a root with branches and commits, so editors can draft on a branch, open a merge request, diff, and publish. The core is framework-agnostic, with first-class helpers for Next.js and React.
Features
Block-based content
Define collections as a typed root plus child blocks. Content is a tree of blocks.
End-to-end type safety
Definitions drive the write API and the read responses. Autocomplete on properties everywhere.
Git-like versioning
Branches, commits, merge requests, and publishing for every content entry.
Plugins
Multi-tenant, i18n, A/B testing, consent, and media optimization ship in the box.
When to use it
- You want content modeling in TypeScript with no separate schema language, and a type-safe API derived from it.
- You need editorial workflows (drafts, review, publishing) backed by your own PostgreSQL database.
- You are building on Next.js or another React framework and want to render structured content yourself.
It is not a turnkey hosted CMS with a prebuilt admin UI: you bring the database, the auth, and the rendering.
Ready to build? Start with the Quickstart.