Crap CMS

Crap CMS is a headless content management system built in Rust. It combines a compiled core with Lua hooks (neovim-style) and an overridable HTMX admin UI.

Motivation

I built several Rust/WebAssembly frontend projects and couldn’t find a CMS that fit the stack. So I built one.

The idea: a simple CMS written in Rust, extensible via a lightweight scripting language, with no complicated build steps or infrastructure requirements.

Inspiration came from what I consider the best solutions out there:

• Lua scripting API — modeled after Neovim and Awesome WM, where Lua gives users deep control without touching core code
• Configuration & hook system — inspired by Payload CMS, an excellent and highly recommended CMS for anyone needing a production-ready solution
• CLI tooling — influenced by Laravel’s comprehensive Artisan CLI
• SQLite + WAL + FTS — sufficient for most of my use cases, and it bundles cleanly into a single binary with zero external dependencies. The database layer is abstracted behind a trait, so alternative relational backends could be added in the future if the need arises
• Pure JavaScript with JSDoc types — no TypeScript, no bundler, no build step. Type safety through JSDoc annotations, checkable with tsc --checkJs without compiling anything
• HTMX + Web Components — easy to theme (similar to WordPress child themes), no frontend build step. Web Components are a native browser standard — no framework updates, no outdated dependencies, no breaking changes
• gRPC API — binary protocol with streaming support, ideal for service-to-service communication. And because I wanted it. A separate REST proxy is available for those who prefer plain JSON over HTTP

The project is functional but not yet production-ready — it still needs to prove itself.

Warning: While in alpha (0.x), breaking changes may appear without prior notice.

Design Philosophy

• Lua is the single source of truth for schemas. Collections and fields are defined in Lua files, not in the database. The database stores content, not structure.
• Single binary. The admin UI (Axum) and gRPC API (Tonic) run in one process on two ports.
• Config directory pattern. All customization lives in one directory, auto-detected from CWD (or set explicitly with --config/-C).
• No JS build step. The admin UI uses Handlebars templates + HTMX with plain CSS.
• Hooks are the extension system. Lua hooks at three levels (field, collection, global) provide full lifecycle control with transaction-safe CRUD access.

Feature Set

• Collections with 20 field types (text, number, textarea, richtext, select, radio, checkbox, date, email, json, code, relationship, array, group, upload, blocks, row, collapsible, tabs, join)
• Globals — single-document collections for site-wide settings
• Hooks — field-level, collection-level, and globally registered lifecycle hooks
• Access Control — collection-level and field-level, with filter constraint support
• Authentication — JWT sessions, password login, custom auth strategies, email verification, password reset
• Uploads — file uploads with automatic image resizing and format conversion (WebP, AVIF)
• Relationships — has-one and has-many with configurable population depth
• Localization — per-field opt-in localization with locale-suffixed columns
• Versions & Drafts — document version history with draft/publish workflow
• Live Updates — real-time mutation events via SSE and gRPC streaming
• Admin UI — template overlay system, theme switching, Web Components
• gRPC API — full CRUD with filtering, pagination, and server reflection
• CLI Tooling — interactive scaffolding wizard, blueprints, data export/import, backups

Tech Stack