keystone

Web Application Framework and Admin GUI / Content Management System built on Express.js and Mongoose

KeystoneJS is a powerful new Node.js content management system and web app framework built on express and mongoose that makes it easy to create sophisticated web sites and apps, and gives you a beautiful, auto-generated Admin UI.

Check out keystonejs.com for documentation and guides.

You can also deploy a starter project to Heroku for free to try it out:

About

Keystone gives you:

A simple way to create a dynamic web site or app with well-structured routes, templates and models
A beautiful Admin UI based on the database models you define
Enhanced models with additional field types and functionality, building on those natively supported by Mongoose
Out of the box session management and authentication
An updates framework for managing data updates or initialisation
Integration with Cloudinary for image uploading, storage and resizing
Integration with Mandrill for sending emails easily
Integration with Google Places for clever location fields
Integration with Embedly for powerful video and rich media embedding tools

... plus a lot of other tools and utilities to make creating complex web apps easier.

Use our Yeoman Generator to get up and running with KeystoneJS quickly, then check out our getting started guide & docs at keystonejs.com/docs/getting-started.

We have a demo website at demo.keystonejs.com where you can play with the Keystone Admin UI, and you can read the source to see how it was built.

Community

We have a friendly, growing community and welcome everyone to get involved.

Here are some ways:

Follow @KeystoneJS on twitter for news and announcements
Join our keystonejs/keystone gitter room to chat with other Keystone users and developers
If you've got ideas, questions or need some advice, check out the KeystoneJS Google Group
Ask technical questions on Stack Overflow and tag them keystonejs
Report bugs and issues on our issue tracker
... or preferably, submit pull request with patches and / or new features

We love to hear feedback about Keystone and the projects you're using it for. Ping us at @KeystoneJS on twitter.

If you are using KeystoneJS in any projects we encourage you to add it to our Related Projects Page. This is also the place to find generators and such that bundle KeystoneJS.

Contributing

If you can, please contribute by reporting issues, discussing ideas, or submitting pull requests with patches and new features. We do our best to respond to all issues and pull requests within a day or two, and make patch releases to npm regularly.

If you're going to contribute code, please follow our coding standards.

Usage

Check out the KeystoneJS Getting Started Guide to start using KeystoneJS.

Installation

The easiest way to get started with Keystone is to use the Yeoman generator:

$ npm install -g generator-keystone
$ yo keystone

Answer the questions, and the generator will create a new project based on the options you select, and install the required packages from npm.

Alternatively, to include Keystone in an existing project or start from scratch (without Yeoman), specify keystone: "^0.2.0" in the dependencies array of your package.json file, and run npm install from your terminal.

Then read through the Documentation and the Example Projects to understand how to use it.

Example application script (keystone.js)

Running in default mode, Keystone takes care of everything required to configure your application with Express, connect to your MongoDB database, and start the web server.

Here is an example of what your keystone.js (or app.js, etc) file may look like:

var keystone = require('keystone');
 
keystone.init({
 
    'name': 'My Project',
    'brand': 'Project',
 
    'less': 'public',
    'static': 'public',
 
    'views': 'templates/views',
    'view engine': 'jade',
 
    'auth': true,
    'user model': 'User',
    'cookie secret': '--- your secret ---',
 
    'auto update': true
 
});
 
keystone.import('models');
 
keystone.set('routes', require('./routes'));
 
keystone.start();

Configuration

Config variables can be passed in an object to the keystone.init method, or can be set any time before keystone.start is called using keystone.set(key, value). This allows for a more flexible order of execution (e.g. if you refer to Lists in your routes, you can set the routes after configuring your Lists, as in the example above).

See the KeystoneJS configuration documentation for details and examples of the available configuration options.

To understand how these settings are used, and how the Express application is initialised, see Keystone.prototype.start in lib/core/start.js.

Database field types

Keystone builds on the basic data types provided by mongo and allows you to easily add rich, functional fields to your application's models.

You get helper methods on your models for dealing with each field type easily (such as formatting a date or number, resizing an image, getting an array of the available options for a select field, or using Google's Places API to improve addresses) as well as a beautiful, responsive admin UI to edit your data with.

See the KeystoneJS database documentation for details and examples of the various field types, as well as how to set up and use database models in your application.

Keystone's field types include:

Keystone also has Relationship fields for managing one-to-many and many-to-many relationships between different models.

Running KeystoneJS in Production

When you deploy your KeystoneJS app to production, be sure to set your ENV environment variable to production. You can do this by setting NODE_ENV=production in your .env file, which gets handled by dotenv.

Setting your environment enables certain features, including template caching, simpler error reporting and html minification, that are important in production but annoying in development.

Linking Keystone for Development and Testing

If you want to test or develop against the master branch of KeystoneJS (or against your own branch), rather than a published version on npm, you just need to check it out then use npm link to link it to your project. On Mac OS, this is done like this:

Checkout KeystoneJS locally, e.g. to ~/Development/KeystoneJS
From the KeystoneJS directory, run sudo npm link (you will need to enter your system password)
From your project directory, e.g. ~/Development/MySite (the one with your package.json file in it) run npm link keystone. This will create a link between ~/Development/MySite/node_modules/keystone and ~/Development/KeystoneJS.

Then require('keystone') normally in your app - the development copy will be used. Note that running npm update will ignore new versions of keystone that have been published.

To go back to using a published version of KeystoneJS from npm, from your project directory, run npm unlink keystone then npm install.

Testing

To run the test suite run npm test.

Thanks

KeystoneJS is a free and open source community-driven project. Thanks to our many contributors and users for making it great.

Thanks to the following companies and projects whose work we have used or taken inspiration from in the making of KeystoneJS:

License

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.