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CairnCMS documentation

CairnCMS is open content and data infrastructure for self-hosted teams. Use it to model data, manage content, expose APIs, and automate workflows from one workspace built on SQL tables you control. Your SQL schema defines the model; CairnCMS adds a governed workspace around it with a REST and GraphQL API, an admin app, role-based permissions, file management, dashboards, and an extension system that covers everything from custom field interfaces to server-side hooks. The result is a single place to manage the structured content and operational data that websites, applications, dashboards, and internal tools depend on.

The docs are organized into six sections, each scoped to a particular kind of work:

  • Getting started — orientation for first-time users. What CairnCMS is, how to spin one up, how the pieces fit together, and the vocabulary used throughout the rest of the docs.
  • Guides — operator and content-author tasks in the admin app. Modeling data, managing users and permissions, creating content, configuring automation.
  • Develop — building applications against the API and extending the platform with custom interfaces, hooks, endpoints, operations, and the rest of the nine extension types.
  • Manage — running CairnCMS in production. Configuration, deployment, security hardening, backups, upgrades, and the schema-as-code and config-as-code workflows.
  • API reference — REST and GraphQL endpoint reference. Authentication, items, files, the query DSL, the SDK, and the system collections that hold platform-managed state.
  • Contributing — how to contribute code or documentation to CairnCMS itself: repository layout, local development setup, and the project’s PR conventions.

Where to start

Section titled “Where to start”