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Directus

Directus is a headless CMS that instantly turns your SQL database into REST and GraphQL APIs and gives you a beautiful, intuitive no-code app to manage all your content and data.

But it's also more than just a headless CMS. It’s an open data platform that has all the tools you need for creating, managing, serving, visualizing, and even automating your data for your next web, mobile, or digital project.

⚡ Now with 🕸️🧦 WebSockets and GraphQL subscription support through Directus Realtime.

Agencies, Fortune 500s, and organizations in-between are using Directus for many different types of use cases in addition to Headless CMS.

If you want to go to market faster with a solution that’s also ready for true-production scale - Directus is the choice for your next headless CMS.

Get Started with Directus ⚡​

-> Create your account on Directus Cloud to spin up your first project

or...

Quickly get started with the self-hosted version using Docker.

Helpful Links 🔗

Key Features of Directus 🧰​

Instant REST and GraphQL APIs – Directus creates powerful and easy to use REST and GraphQL APIs from your SQL database in 90 seconds or less. The APIs are highly performant and come with built-in features like robust authentication, caching, image transformation, aggregation, filtering, sorting, and pagination.

Intuitive No-Code App (CMS) – Developers AND non-technical users love how easy it is to manage content and even data models inside our Data Studio.

The Directus item detail page is shown. A popup is displayed above a field titled Blocks. The popup contains choices for different sections of a webpage - Hero, Columns, FAQs, Call To Action, Form, Card Group

Page Builder – Take advantage of Many To Any (M2A) Relationships to create a page builder that allows your content editors to build pages composed of different components with totally customizable schemas.

Live Preview – Preview how your content will appear on your live site right within Directus... without waiting on long build times or deploy previews.

The Directus translations interface is shown. Title, Summary, and Description fields are shown and editable in two different languages – Spanish and Chinese.

Localization & Translations – Directus makes it easy manage multilingual content with a specialized interface that users love. And no matter what languages your organization requires, our Admin App supports a growing number of locales.

Realtime – With WebSockets, you can effortlessly integrate real-time data updates into your frontend applications. Say goodbye to manual polling or workarounds, and embrace a more efficient and elegant solution that keeps your applications in sync with the latest information in real time.

Users and Authentication – Built-in JWT auth supports SSO via OAuth, OpenID, and LDAP, with 2FA and configurable password policies.

Roles and Permissions – Keep your data secure by creating unlimited roles and permissions to ensure users only access what they need. Add custom filter rules, custom validation, field-level permissions, IP allow-lists, and configurable public access.

A Directus dashboard is shown. It features charts, graphs, and metrics for the following data – Total MRR, New Daily Customers, Twitter Followers, Total ARR, Github Issues, CPU, Memory, Disk, Top Spending Customers, Total Projects

Custom Dashboards – You no longer have to turn to separate business intelligence tools to get the reporting you need. With Insights you can rapidly build helpful dashboards without writing any code.

The Directus Flows builder is shown. The automation workflow for User Signup Flow has one trigger – On Data Change and several operations - Ignore Drafts, Notify Admins, and one other operation that is cut off from view.

Built-In Automation – Stop stringing crazy workflows together with apps like Zapier, Make, or others. The Directus Flows module provides custom, event driven data processing and task automation right within your headless CMS.

Extensibility – Directus is highly modular and extensible. Your team can fully white-label it, create your own custom modules, interfaces, API endpoints, and much more using the Extensions SDK.

Directus Architecture 🤖​

Unopinionated to the core

Directus completely conforms to your tech stack, with support for any SQL database vendor and schema, REST and GraphQL APIs, all auth providers, and any file storage.

Architecture diagram that has several levels. Directus is at the middle of the diagram. Connected below Directus are different channels – desktop, smartphone, IoT devices, and ecommerce.

Node.js (APIs) + Vue (No-code app)

Built entirely in Typescript, primarily on Node.js and Vue.js, Directus is 100% open-source, modular and extensible, ensuring your project never hits a hard feature ceiling. The platform scales without issue, and some Projects have hundreds of millions of users.

Resources​