📖 What is Mishka CMS?

Mishka CMS is an open source real-time CMS built on Elixir, Phoenix LiveView and the Ash framework. You build pages in the browser, publish them without a redeploy, and run many websites from one install.

This repository is the application that runs it: the Phoenix endpoint, the router, the release scripts and the Dockerfile. The engine and the extensions are packages it loads from Hex.

✨ Why Mishka CMS

• 🌐 Many websites, one install: each brand, client or market gets its own site with its own domain, languages, users and content. One master account runs them all.
• 🎨 Visual page builder: place sections and components on a live canvas, edit text in place and check every screen size. The code behind the page is one click away.
• ⚡ Publish without a redeploy: pages, layouts and components live in the database and compile while the app runs. Visitors with the page open get the new styles at once.
• 📝 Drafts and versions: your work saves to a draft, teammates review it from a link, and every earlier version can be restored.
• 🔍 SEO with no setup: every page ships with its title, description, canonical link, social preview and structured data, and pages without an image get a share card drawn for them. Each site has its own sitemap and robots.txt.
• 🌍 Every language you publish in: one site serves several languages, with addresses like /fa/blog, translated pages and interface words, and dates and numbers in each language's own format.
• 🔐 Secure sign-in: passwords or emailed sign-in links, two-step sign-in with an authenticator app, rate limits, and a captcha from Cloudflare Turnstile, Google reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha.
• 🛡️ Permissions you can read: names like admin:dashboard:blog:post, with wildcards, kept apart for the dashboard and the API. Lock a page or a post to members.
• 🔌 Headless, coupled or both: a site serves its own pages, a JSON:API for your frontend, or both. The API comes with an OpenAPI spec and Swagger UI.
• 🧩 Plugins instead of forks: every action fires a named event such as blog:comment:after_create, and your plugin hooks in by priority.
• 🧱 Components and UI kits: install a kit of ready components, write your own, and reuse snippets and design tokens across a site.
• 🧰 Everything a site needs: a media library, forms, redirects, email delivery and an activity log of every change.
• 🤖 Bring your own AI model: connect a model to the editor's Assistant with one Elixir module, and undo its edits like your own.

🚀 Get started

Follow Install Mishka CMS and sign in, then build your first site and start a blog. In short, with Elixir 1.20 or newer, PostgreSQL and bun:

git clone https://github.com/mishka-group/mishka_cms.git && cd mishka_cms
mix deps.get && mix assets.setup
mix ecto.create && mix oban.install --yes
mix ash.codegen cms_with_extensions && mix ash.migrate
mix assets.build && mix phx.server

Open http://localhost:4000, and the install wizard creates the master admin and the first site. mix run priv/repo/dev_seeds.exs fills a development database with sample sites and content. Without a local Elixir or PostgreSQL, use the development container in examples/docker.

🧪 Try the demo image

docker pull ghcr.io/mishka-group/mishka_cms-demo:0.0.2

demo-docker-compose.yml starts it with PostgreSQL 18 and explains the secrets. Open /install?token=... with your MISHKA_SETUP_TOKEN. The demo is for trying only: its migrations belong to one release, so a newer demo needs a fresh database.

🚢 Deploy

A real install is your own copy of this repository, built with its Dockerfile.

1. Generate the migrations for the extensions you load and commit them: run mix oban.install --yes and mix ash.codegen first_install, then commit priv/repo/migrations and priv/resource_snapshots. The build fails without them.
2. Run the image with DATABASE_URL, SECRET_KEY_BASE, TOKEN_SIGNING_SECRET and SESSION_SIGNING_SALT, and with MISHKA_SETUP_TOKEN for the first run.
3. Mount a volume at MISHKA_DATA_DIR (/app/mishka_data), and run /app/bin/migrate before /app/bin/server.

To upgrade, bump the Mishka packages in mix.exs, run mix deps.update for them and mix ash.codegen upgrade_<version>, commit what it wrote and deploy. mix dev_reset regenerates every migration, so keep it to throwaway development databases.

🧩 The Mishka CMS family

• Mishka CMS Core, the Elixir CMS engine: sites, pages, permissions, the runtime compiler and the JSON:API.
• Mishka CMS Builder, the visual page editor: the live canvas, drafts, history and review notes.
• Mishka Blog, the blog extension: posts, categories, tags, authors and moderated comments.
• Mishka Document, the documentation extension: versioned docs, proposed changes as drafts, and issue tracking.
• Mishka Gervaz, the admin DSL for Ash: the toolkit the admin screens are built with.
• Mishka Installer, plugins and events for Elixir: the event system every plugin hooks into.
• Mishka Chelekom, Phoenix LiveView components: the UI kits the install wizard offers.
• Sign-in providers: Google, GitHub, Slack and Discord.

📚 Documentation

• Mishka CMS documentation: tutorials, how-to guides, reference and concepts
• The Blog extension docs and the Documentation extension docs
• Mishka Installer documentation, for plugins and events
• The Mishka blog, for releases and articles

💬 Community and support

• Chat with the team and other users on Discord.
• Report a bug or ask a question in GitHub issues.
• For a custom extension, a migration from another CMS or priority support, hire the Mishka team.

💖 Support the project

Mishka CMS is free and open source. You can support its development through GitHub Sponsors or Buy Me a Coffee.

📜 License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.