Installation

npm i @jee-r/astro-decap-cms

What is this?

This is an integration for the Astro site builder, which adds support for Decap CMS, an open-source, Git-based content management system.

Adding the integration will:

• Add the Decap CMS dashboard at /admin (or another route if you prefer)
• Inject Netlify’s Identity Widget across your site to support logging in to the admin app
• Run a local proxy server in dev mode to allow local content updates via the CMS

Usually each of these requires individual set up and configuration. Using this integration, you configure your CMS once in astro.config.mjs, sit back, and enjoy!

Looking for a quick way to get started? Check out the demo included in this repository.

Usage

Adding the integration

To add Decap CMS to your project, import and use the integration in your Astro config file, adding it to the integrations array.

Note: If you're upgrading from version 0.x, the integration has been renamed from NetlifyCMS to DecapCMS. See the CHANGELOG for migration details.

// astro.config.mjs

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import DecapCMS from '@jee-r/astro-decap-cms';

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [
    DecapCMS({
      config: {
        backend: {
          name: 'git-gateway',
          branch: 'main',
        },
        collections: [
          // Content collections
        ],
      },
    }),
  ],
});

Configuration options

You can pass an options object to the integration to configure how it behaves.

adminPath

Type: string Default: '/admin'

Determines the route where the Decap CMS admin dashboard will be available on your site.

Feeling nostalgic for WordPress? You could set this to '/wp-admin'!

cmsVersion

Type: string Default: '3.10.0'

Specifies which version of Decap CMS to use. The CMS is automatically fetched from unpkg and cached locally for optimal performance.

Supports:

• Exact versions: '3.10.0'
• Semver ranges: '^3.0.0'
• Latest: 'latest'

DecapCMS({
  cmsVersion: '^3.0.0', // Use latest 3.x version
  config: { /* ... */ }
})

The CMS file is automatically cached in node_modules/.cache/ after the first build, enabling offline development and faster subsequent builds.

config

Type: CmsConfig

This option is required. It allows you to configure Decap CMS with the same options you would use when using Decap CMS’s config.yml file format.

You can see a full list of configuration options in the Decap CMS docs.

At a minimum, you must set the backend and collections options:

config: {
  // Use Netlify’s “Git Gateway” authentication and target our default branch
  backend: {
    name: 'git-gateway',
    branch: 'main',
  },
  collections: [
    // Define a blog post collection
    {
      name: 'posts',
      label: 'Blog Posts',
      folder: 'src/pages/posts',
      create: true,
      delete: true,
      fields: [
        { name: 'title', widget: 'string', label: 'Post Title' },
        { name: 'body', widget: 'markdown', label: 'Post Body' },
      ],
    },
  ],
};

previewStyles

Type: Array<string | [string, { raw: true }]>

Sets custom CSS styles to apply in the Decap CMS preview pane.

You can provide URLs to external CSS stylesheets (Google Fonts for example), paths to local CSS files in your project, or even raw CSS strings:

previewStyles: [
  // Path to a local CSS file, relative to your project’s root directory
  '/src/styles/main.css',
  // An npm module identifier
  '@fontsource/roboto',
  // A URL to an externally hosted CSS file
  'https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=IBM+Plex+Mono&display=swap',
  // Raw CSS!
  ['p { color: red; }', { raw: true }],
];

disableIdentityWidgetInjection

Type: boolean Default: false

By default, @jee-r/astro-decap-cms injects Netlify's Identity Widget across your site to enable authentication. If you only want to inject the widget on the admin route, you can set disableIdentityWidgetInjection: true.

Development

Prerequisites

This project uses pnpm as package manager. Make sure you have it installed:

npm install -g pnpm

Building the package

To compile the TypeScript source code:

pnpm run build

This compiles all files from src/ to dist/.

Testing

Run the full test suite (builds the package and the demo):

pnpm test

This will:

1. Build the package (pnpm run build)
2. Install demo dependencies (cd demo && pnpm install --frozen-lockfile)
3. Build the demo Astro site (pnpm run build)

Working with the demo

The demo/ directory contains a working example of the integration.

To run the demo in development mode:

cd demo
pnpm install
pnpm run dev

This will start:

• The Astro dev server (typically at http://localhost:4321)
• The Decap CMS proxy server for local content editing

Credits

This project is a maintained fork of astro-netlify-cms by @delucis, updated to support Decap CMS (the community-maintained successor to Netlify CMS).

Some improvements were inspired by the Advanced Astro fork, including dependency updates and tooling configurations. These changes were manually integrated rather than cherry-picked to maintain:

• Conventional commit format
• Semantic versioning continuity (their fork reset from 0.6.1 to 0.2.0)
• Consistent package naming and branding
• Clean project history

Thanks to all contributors and maintainers of both projects.

To-do

• Support registering custom preview components to render content as it is edited.
• Support registering custom block components for use in the Markdown editor.