Repoco

A fairly minimalist mildly opinionated headless CMS with local git repo support.

Why?

There isn't one. I need one.

Is there one? Tell me about it. I'd rather not roll my own, but all I could find were projects way too over-complex, and often way too expensive for my use-case.

Not only that, but absolutely none of them worked with a local git repo.

What is your use-case

I maintain a number of small websites for non-technical people, all built with Jekyll. I want to be able to give these folk limited edit access to some of the Jekyll source files, so they can make small text changes themselves and publish them, both to the test and live versions of their site. That's it.

I don't want to have to rebuild the whole site in order to integrate a CMS. I don't need users to be to able upload anything, redesign things, add pages, remove sections or anything like that. Also, I don't want to tie myself down to using Jekyll forever, in case I switch to something else, so I want something only loosely coupled to the actual web front end.

I just want limited editing of a few files in a git repo, plus hooks to my custom deployment scripts. For now. Bells and whistles can come later or, preferably, never.

Also, I am quite happy with keeping my git setup as it is, so I don't want to have to move the whole lot over to Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket or anywhere else, nor to have to implement some bug-prone Rube Goldberg-like multi-repo mirroring contraption.

Finally, I want to self-host the whole thing, and have the project be OSS.

Surely someone somewhere has already done this

You would have thought so. Not that I could find.

Why Repoco

Twenty years ago I had the exact same problem, which I ended up solving with my own Perl-based CMS called Poco. It was terrible, it was clunky, it was a pain to maintain, but users actually used it, and were able to edit pages on their own site without too much trouble.

After Poco, I swore I would never make the same mistake again.

And here we are.

I see what you did there

Thanks.

Does it actually work yet?

Mostly, so long as a) you only want to allow users to edit Markdown files, b) you are happy to live with the bug that these files can only be a maximum of one directory deep in a repo, and c) you are ok with the fact that I am still actively working on this before I call something a 'release'.

Oh and d) the documentation is long and tedious and overly chatty. You probably guessed that already if you read down this far.

See the TODO file for details.

I found a bug / have a suggestion

You are my new favourite person. Please tell me about it / submit a pull request, as you see fit.