PencilBlue

Full featured online publishing and CMS for Node.js

To learn how to build websites with PencilBlue, read our tutorials.

The first open source content management system to meet all the needs of a modern website:

• Full blogging capabilities, out of the box
• Relational data creation and management, through the admin interface
• An expansive plugin framework that allows for modification of even core platform functionality
• Designed for the cloud, with built in support for server clustering and high availability websites
• Built in support for some of the latest and most popular web technologies, including MongoDB, Redis, Bootstrap, AngularJS, and jQueryUI
• 100% mobile ready through responsive web design
• Touch friendly, drag and drop website management experience that's easy for non-technical users to learn

Installation

The instructions below assume that Node.js and MongoDB are installed on your machine. If they are not then please visit http://nodejs.org and http://www.mongodb.org to install them.

PencilBlue Command-line interface

1. Install the pencilblue-cli module: sudo npm install -g pencilblue-cli
2. Run pencilblue install [directory] where [directory] is the directory you want PencilBlue to be installed to.
3. Follow the install instructions
4. After the installation is done, cd into the folder where you installed PencilBlue
5. Run pencilblue start

Manual installation

1. Clone the PencilBlue repository
2. cd into the cloned repository's folder
3. Run npm install to retrieve PencilBlue's dependencies. Depending on your system access privileges, you may have to run sudo npm install
4. (Optional) Install Redis for caching
5. (Optional) Create a custom configuration file using the provided sample.config.json. The file can reside in two places: within the root folder of your installation as config.json or at /etc/pencilblue/config.json. The installation root takes precedence. If running all services locally, no configuration file is needed, but a configuration file is necessary for overriding specific settings.
6. Start PencilBlue. You can simply run node pencilblue, but we recommend using nodemon for development and forever for production. Nodemon will restart PencilBlue on file changes and forever will ensure that PencilBlue is always running.

# development
nodemon pencilblue

OR

# production
sudo forever start pencilblue.js

7. Navigate to the site root you specified in a configuration file or http://localhost:8080 by default.