create-taproot

Scaffold a Taproot CMS server.

npm create taproot my-cms

Taproot is a DB-backed, Astro-native CMS built for a site with many non-technical contributors — a visual content-type builder, hierarchical URLs that actually nest, blocks, revisions, a review workflow, batched releases, and an accessibility checker that reads your content.

What this creates

The CMS server: the deployment that owns the database, the admin panel, and the API. It runs on Cloudflare Workers + D1 + R2, and on Node and SQLite in development.

Not the website. Taproot is two deployments, and that is the design rather than an inconvenience — the site that visitors read is a separate Astro project that installs @taprootcms/astro, holds an API key, and reads over HTTP. That is why editing a page cannot take the site down, and why the site can be redesigned without touching what has been written. Scaffolding that half here would mean generating somebody's front end, and Taproot ships no templates for the same reason it ships no block components.

Getting started

npm create taproot my-cms
cd my-cms
npm install
npm run db:migrate
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:4321. There are no accounts yet, so it takes you to a one-time setup screen that creates the first administrator.

Complete that screen before putting the server anywhere public. Until an account exists, whoever reaches the URL first becomes the administrator.

Options

npm create taproot [directory] [options]

  --starter <blank|minimal>  What the CMS starts with. Default: blank
  --local <path>             Depend on a local Taproot checkout via file:
  -y, --yes                  Take defaults, ask nothing

blank gives you the database and nothing else. Right if you already know your content model.

minimal adds a Page type with a few fields, a home page, and a menu — so the admin has something in it and the delivery API returns something, rather than being an empty shell you have to populate before anything is visible.

Neither creates a user account. The first administrator comes from the setup screen, which closes behind itself the moment an account exists; a seeded account with a known password would end up in every scaffolded project, and the ones nobody changed would be the ones that mattered.

Requirements

Node 22.12 or newer, and nothing else. Taproot has zero native dependencies — no image library to compile, no password-hashing binary, no database server — so npm install never needs a C++ toolchain.

Documentation

The handbook covers writing content, administering a site, running the server, and building the website that reads from it. See the repository.

License

MIT