Overview

Chukfi is a headless CMS — a content management system that provides a content API and admin interface without dictating how your frontend renders content.

Note: The video below demonstrates a planned npm distribution workflow. v0.2.0 ships as a Rust binary — install via cargo install chukfi-bin or build from source. Follow the written guides below.

How It Works

Binary-First Distribution

Chukfi ships as a Rust binary via cargo install chukfi-bin. The admin dashboard is embedded in the binary, and chukfi init scaffolds a config:

cargo install chukfi-bin
chukfi init                 # Writes chukfi.config.json + .env.example
chukfi serve                # Start the API server on :8080

For the optional Dioxus admin UI, build from source:

git clone https://github.com/smattera/chukfi-core
cd chukfi-core
cd chukfi-admin-ui && trunk serve    # Optional admin UI on :8081

Local-to-Prod Parity

Local dev and production both use AWS RDS PostgreSQL — each developer gets their own db.t4g.micro instance via chukfi db create. Same engine, same migrations, same SQL. No SQLite dual-mode — the schema uses Postgres-specific features (tsvector, JSONB, gen_random_uuid()) that have no drop-in SQLite equivalents.

Admin Dashboard

The admin interface is an embedded vanilla-JS dashboard bundled into the binary and served automatically at /. No build step, no Node, no separately deployed assets. A Dioxus 0.7 WASM admin UI is available as an optional richer alternative (chukfi-admin-ui/).

Target Audience

Developers who want a headless CMS that compiles to a single Rust binary with an embedded admin dashboard and PostgreSQL-backed content management.