contentjet / contentjet-api

Headless API-first content management system

contentjet-api

A Node based back end for contentjet, a powerful headless API-first CMS. Built with Koa, Objection and PostgreSQL.

Contentjet is composed of 2 discrete applications, the backend API contentjet-api (this repository) and the frontend HTML user interface contentjet-ui.

For more information and hosting documentation please visit contentjet.github.io.

Development

Requirements

• Node 8+
• NPM 5+
• PostgreSQL 9.5+

1. Installation

npm install

2. Configuration

The app is configurable through the use of environment variables. Environment variables can either be exported directly or you may optionally create a .env file in the root of the repository and specify them there. Note any exported variables will take precedence over those defined in .env. See dotenv for more details.

For a complete list of all options refer to src/config/index.ts. While most options have default fallbacks you will need to provide values for the following:

Secret key

Secret key is used in the hashing of passwords and tokens. You must supply a random string to this value and be sure to keep it secret!

SECRET_KEY=yoursupersecretkey

Database

Database connection settings. Note only PostgreSQL 9.5+ is supported.

POSTGRES_HOST=localhost
POSTGRES_PORT=5432
POSTGRES_DB=contentjet-api
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password

URLs

The application needs to know where it's hosted.

FRONTEND_URL is the url hosting contentjet-ui.

FRONTEND_URL=https://example.com

BACKEND_URL is the url hosting this application (contentjet-api).

BACKEND_URL=https://api.example.com

Mail

You MUST provide the following SMTP settings for email sending.

[email protected]
SMTP_HOST=your-smtp-host
SMTP_PORT=your-smtp-host-port
SMTP_USER=your-smtp-user
SMTP_PASSWORD=your-smtp-password

3. Database migration

Run the following command to create the required tables in your database.

npm run migrate

4. Create application administrator

You must create at least one administrator user.

npm run create-admin-user

5. Run

Start the server.

npm run dev

contentjet-api's Issues

Fetch all entries ( Including Fields ) by entryTypeId

Really like how streamlined this is for a headless API so I started playing around with it.

I'm not sure if this is possible though...

I've been trying to fetch all entries by entryTypeId to then look at their respective fields etc. without hitting the API up numerous times on a single entry call for each respective entryId

I tried /project/1/entry/?entryType=2

To fetch all of entryTypeId === 2, And it returns entries, but those entry blobs do not have the fields that I associated with them when creating entry types.

Right now I am looking at the possibility of pushing all the matching entry ids from that request to /project/1/entry/x Where x is each id I pulled from the previous request, but this would lead to a large amount of API calls on any large scale platform.

Am I missing something?

Endpoint Authentication Configuration

Been playing around for a few hours (you may recall from reddit the guy with the odd docker issue).

Looking at the swagger, I see most of the endpoints require authentication and I cannot see any configuration for this, and while some most certainly should be authenticated, things like Entry and Media at the very least should be auth configurable. In it's current setup this makes it very unsecured to use on a public facing site if I were to want to use this as a replacement for something like a wordpress blog, I would need to hardcode authentication in order to fetch back content.

I would actually be quite happy to help on the UI implementation side of this, when I get my new machine next week will see about setting everything up locally, but great work so far. Definitely the best implementation of a headless CMS I have seen so far.

Make storage engines pluggable

Currently contentjet-api comes with a single storage engine which writes files to disk. This is fine for simple setups but limits the app from scaling horizontally. Need to provide a way to load and configure storage engines for writing to different storage providers such as AWS S3 etc.

Some thoughts which are by no means final:

• Storage engines should be installable via NPM and adhere to a defined API.
• Considering the app is distributed via Docker images users would have to npm install inside their container or extend the base image. Is that too hard?