Quick Start

1. Scaffold a new project

The fastest way to get started is the interactive init wizard:

crap-cms init ./my-project

The wizard walks you through:

1. Admin port (default: 3000)
2. gRPC port (default: 50051)
3. Localization — enable and choose locales (e.g., en, de, fr)
4. Auth collection — creates a users collection with email/password login
5. First admin user — prompts for email and password right away
6. Upload collection — creates a media collection for file/image uploads
7. Additional collections — keep adding as many as you need

A JWT auth secret is auto-generated and written to crap.toml so tokens survive restarts.

When it finishes you’ll have a ready-to-run config directory:

my-project/
├── crap.toml
├── init.lua
├── .luarc.json
├── .gitignore
├── collections/
│   ├── users.lua
│   └── media.lua
├── globals/
├── hooks/
├── migrations/
├── templates/
├── static/
├── types/
│   └── crap.lua
├── data/
└── uploads/

2. Start the server

cd my-project
crap-cms serve

This starts:

• Admin UI at http://localhost:3000/admin
• gRPC API at localhost:50051

3. Log in to the admin UI

Visit http://localhost:3000/admin/login and sign in with the credentials you created during init.

If you skipped user creation during init, bootstrap one now:

# Interactive (prompts for password)
crap-cms user create -e admin@example.com

# Non-interactive
crap-cms user create \
    -e admin@example.com \
    -p secret123 \
    -f role=admin \
    -f name="Admin User"

4. Create content via gRPC

Use grpcurl to interact with the API. The server supports reflection, so no proto import is needed:

# List all posts
grpcurl -plaintext localhost:50051 crap.ContentAPI/Find \
    -d '{"collection": "posts"}'

# Create a post
grpcurl -plaintext localhost:50051 crap.ContentAPI/Create \
    -d '{
      "collection": "posts",
      "data": {
        "title": "Hello World",
        "slug": "hello-world",
        "status": "draft",
        "content": "My first post."
      }
    }'

Alternative: Run with the example config

The repository includes an example/ config directory with sample collections, useful if you’re building from source:

git clone https://github.com/dkluhzeb/crap-cms.git
cd crap-cms
cargo build --release
./target/release/crap-cms serve -C ./example

Then bootstrap an admin user:

crap-cms user create -C ./example -e admin@example.com