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Directus 9 — Instant no-code app and dynamic API for any SQL database
Directus turns any SQL database into a no-code app and powerful API. Our open-source platform is completely migration-free, seamlessly layering on top of your new or existing database, providing you with a suite of tools to manage and connect your content.
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@maria_brm Thank you for the excellent feedback! Need a bit of clarification on the question - Are you asking if we can download an Insights Dashboard? e.g. as a pdf or similar?
@w0kyj @maria_brm Technically yes, you can use the browser to Print the Dashboard... and choose "Print as PDF". It's a workaround, but will work until we have more Insights Export options!
@w0kyj @benhaynes Awesome! *_* Thanks a lot for the answer! I am looking forward to gathering my first experiences on this amazing platform! ^_^
Hey Everyone! 👋
I’m Ben from the Directus Team. After years of development, we’re super excited to finally share our open-source data platform with you today!
Directus instantly turns your relational database into a no-code app for non-technical business users, and automatically adds a powerful API (REST & GraphQL) for developers. More importantly, there’s zero migration or vendor lock-in. The platform simply layers on top of your new or existing database, leaving your schema and content pristine and unaltered.
⚡ CORE FEATURES
• Free, Open-Source, and No Paywalls
• Instantly layers on top of any new or existing SQL database
• Supports Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, MS SQL Server, OracleDB, Aurora, etc
• Dynamic REST API, GraphQL, CLI, JS-SDK, & Webhooks
• Intuitive no-code App and Insights Dashboard
• 100% JavaScript & TypeScript, on Node.js & Vue 3
• Built-in Auth: OAuth2, OIDC/OpenID, LDAP, etc
• Granular Role-based Access Control Filters
• Translate Content in our Multilingual App (30+ Languages)
• White-Label, Modular, Extensible, & Customizable
• Install via Docker, NPM, GitHub, or Cloud
Our platform contains everything needed to build highly performant projects at scale, including granular role-based access control, custom layouts/interfaces, dashboard insights, event hooks, advanced filtering, revision history, asset management, and numerous auth options (OAuth2, OIDC, LDAP). 🛠️
What will you build with the world’s first Open Data Platform? Below are just some of the popular projects our millions of users have been creating. 🚀
• Headless CMS: Manage content for digital experiences of any scale.
• Web App Builder: Create internal tools, dashboards, and back-office apps.
• SaaS & IoT: Organize and visualize data from SaaS tenants, IoT devices/sensors.
• Mobile & Native Apps: Power gaming, business, education, and lifestyle apps.
Directus has come a long way over the past 18 years, but one thing will never change: the entire platform is completely free and open-source, with no paywalls or artificial limitations. A huge thanks to our dedicated team, passionate contributors, growing community, and millions of open-source users. ❤️
While self-hosting is always free, if you'd rather give Directus a try on our fully-managed cloud service, we've created this special promo code to give you 4 months free: HappyHunter2021
We hope you’ll give our platform a try, and can’t wait to hear your thoughts and feedback. There are a lot of big things planned for the next few months... so stay tuned.
Thank you! 🙌
Replying up here for better visibility. In case you missed it, we included a special promo code for our new managed Cloud service which will get you 4 months of Directus completely free: HappyHunter2021
https://directus.cloud/
Though, please keep in mind that our entire platform is completely free and open-source... so you never need to pay. This is just an easy way to try things out without touching the CLI or pay for your own servers! ☁️
@benhaynes Congratulations on the launch of Directus 9. We are happy to be part of Directus Team, and we know this will become #1 Headless CMS Soon.
I would love to try and will share feedback soon. 🤝
@benhaynes @kaushal_im Thank you! Feedback makes us stronger and better :)
@kaushal_im Hey Kaushal — great to see such a long-time user here! 👋 We've been working hard on Directus 9 and the accompanying (optional) Cloud service. Can't wait to give you a tour!
OH MY GOD! This is something really amaizng people like me. I guess even it doesn`t matter you know coding or not, this tool is amazing to turn everything so useful analytics. I am going to test this out! VEEEERY VEEEERY WELL DONE!
@ayaz_karimov1 Thank you!!! With the help of awesome developers and content managers we hope to revolutionize the way people manage data/content. Cheers!
@ayaz_karimov1 Yeehaw!! 🤠 You'll absolutely love our brand new Insights Module... it lets you create completely custom dashboards based on any data in your database. It has panels for metrics, dynamic lists, time-series charts, and labels... but the Panels themselves are extensions (just like everything in Directus), so you can literally create anything! 👀
No one will probably notice this, but my favorite thing about the Insights dashboard panels is that they "pop" together when you drag them close on the grid. So you can actually combine them into really clean layouts. ✨
@benhaynes Believe in me I am already excited, that`s really cool stuff that you build. It is no long time that I`m on this platform, but definetely your poduct is may fav <3
@ayaz_karimov1 That's great to hear! Give it a whirl, and let us know what you think. We always welcome our user's feedback!
Hello makers. I was just preparing to use Directus in a new project, studied it quite a bit before and found it to be almost perfect for what I need.
Just a question to ?makers - is there a way to configure a master - detail view? Like looking at an author page in the admin area and also seeing a configurable table of articles written by that author on the same page?
@andreasfruth Nice! Glad you're liking the platform so far!
This is an awesome idea, and one I think of quite a bit: how can we best visualize nested relational data. There are a few options we're going through, and one or more will 100% be included... hopefully in the coming month or so.
Tree-View Layout — This is an easy one... tree views are built for relational data. So if you're on the Authors collection, you could expand to view nested Articles within each. The main question here is: should this be a dedicated Layout, or built into the existing Table Layout?
Item Grouping — Another way to do this would be to allow relational Grouping. What I love about this one is that it could work on more Layouts... combining to make things even more flexible/powerful. For instance, you could have grouping on a Table, Card, or custom layout, where you're seeing Articles grouped by their Author.
Split View — Slightly different, this option could also use ANY Layout type. It would essentially add a right section (always open and non-blocking, unlike our drawer) that shows nested items (eg: Articles) when you select an item (eg: an Author).
Of course you could also get part of the way there with Displays... but I like the idea of seeing the bigger picture all at once! Would love your thoughts on the above! 🧐
@benhaynes Sorry, I totally missed this. I think for my use case best would be the split view, showing related items (like articles on an author page) as a table detail (configurable). But i believe the other can be also useful. I will reach out to you guys to keep you up to date with my progress! :)
Hi @benhaynes 👋, thanks for the great product 😎. I still has a question, when or how we will able to use our existing database tables with Directus 🙄?
@kodozani Hey! Directus can be installed on top of any existing (or new) SQL database, and the database won't be changed. We are also about to release remote SQL/database access for our Cloud, so that will enable the same thing. Also, thanks for the kind words!
@benhaynes Thanks for the details. My real problem is to use existing data, that is already there, but Directus cannot read or modify it. So that we can use its awesome features to old tables and schemas.
@kodozani Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but Directus can do that! If you want to use an on-prem database with our cloud service, that would be a "hybrid deployment", which we are working on too!
@benhaynes So we can edit any row or column in an existing schema/database from Directus UI? For ex. I have a AWESOME table with name, project, order columns. I want to alter this table with Directus UI/API to insert new data or new column.
Could you please share a documentation link for this case study if I am not bothering you 🥲
@kodozani Not a bother at all! But yes, this is exactly what Directus does. If you install Directus and point it to your database, you will instantly get a full CRUD API for all your tables... and a no-code app for managing things.
SUPER old video (working on some new ones) but this shows how the pure database is mirrored in the App/API:
https://youtu.be/AicEmIeuuLw?t=924
Whoa this looks amazing! ?makers
Is it possible to use Directus as a backend for an app ? For example if I want to manage my users and data in Directus, and use the API on a sub domain (in a custom web app).
@nicolas_legendre Thank you and absolutely yes. This is one of the key use cases our platform supports. Directus dynamically mirrors any SQL database in our Admin App and REST + GraphQL APIs. You can install on an existing SQL database/schema or create a new schema from scratch. :)
Wow, this has improved alot overt the years. I'm gonna jump back in and give it a spin. When I tried it out a couple of years ago it was a bit intimidating for someone like myself. it was obvious how powerful it was, but just immense. Now, it looks super approachable and easier to use- which is a big deal because it was already quite good.
@techronin A lot can happen in a few years!! 😆 We've been working like crazy to improve the UX/UI of the App and API... not to mention switching from PHP to Node.js was an enormous undertaking/improvement.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
@benhaynes Yeah, that migration was a wise decision. I'm definitely gonna check it out. Directus was way ahead of its time when it came out. Give me a few days and I will come back with some thoughts
@benhaynes @techronin Thank you! Looking forward to your feedback and thoughts :)
?makers I would like great thanks to the entire Directus development team. You guys are great fellows and I will gladly support your project and vote for it.
But I also want to ask you to pay close attention to promoting your product. What I mean? Apart from the documentation you maintain you need to pay a lot of attention to maintaining your blog and writing articles, and shoot more YouTube training videos. Arrange online interviews with live developers and ask them more questions about using Directus on real projects. What tasks do they solve with Directus.
Your main competitor is Strapi. And Strapi has a lot of tutorials and videos on the Internet that help learn the platform faster and use it for concrete project. Engage bloggers-developers and ask them to shoot a video tutorial on installing and configuring Directus or a video tutorial on creating an application with Vue + Directus / React + Directus, etc.
When I go to the main Directus website, the Blog section, I see very few articles there and the update time is very long. One gets the feeling that no one is following this and there is no separate manager for content and promotion, but this is very important!
@vadimmatkarimov thank you very much for the detailed feedback! We are actively looking to gain more ground on some if not all of the areas you have pointed out, and feedbacks like yours help immensely for us to tackle these aspects.
Stay tuned for more articles, guides and bite-sized videos that we have been brewing recently!
@vadimmatkarimov Thanks, Vadim — I could not agree more with this feedback. Let me give some insight into where we are, and where we're heading next.
Docs, guides, videos and all other learning resources are critical for the developer experience. We have been a small two-person team for 17 years, and were just able to start hiring a bigger team a few months ago. We have focused on hiring engineers first, so we could get v9 completed and stable. Docs were overhauled (mostly structure), but we didn't dive deep into content since so much was in flux pre-release.
We're now actively looking for a full-time Technical Content Writer (many interviews in the past week, spread the word if you know anyone interested!) and can't wait to get that person onboard soon so we can hit the ground running. We also JUST brought on a non-technical content writer to help out.
Last week we dedicated one of our team members to creating short explainer videos... you may have seen these 30s to 2m videos on our Twitter. Once we have a good library of these, we'll be consolidating them into the Docs too. We also have been talking with a bunch of YouTube devs about working on some commissioned videos (we have a few, but never enough).
Lastly, our Core team has a bunch of great integration articles in the works (think: how to get running with Directus + Gatsby, Nuxt, React, Huge, etc). These are coming along nicely, but any time working on that is not spent on platform dev... so it's a tradeoff!
I could go on with FAR more examples, but the TL;DR is that this is the next big thing we'll be focused on. We recognize how important it is, and that there's always a lot of room for improvement. Starting this week, we're making Docs updates a requirement for all fixes/PRs from our team... this will help break it into more manageable tasks, instead of a huge mountain to climb. ✍️
@vadimmatkarimov Also going to ping @nitwel here... who has been working on these awesome short videos so he knows how important his work is! 😊
@benhaynes Thank you for a detailed explanation of your future plans. I wish you all succeed.
I want to give you a couple more ideas, how to tell as much as possible about your product, so that people not only learn about it, but also begin to actively use Directus in their projects. Pay special attention to the freecodecamp.org YouTube channel, contact these guys, prepare a video course on the topic: "How to create a ready-made application using Directus + vue" or "How to create a ready-made application using Directus + react". You can choose the simplest application, for example: "a dashboard for analytics" or "a simple blog", or a "food ordering system", for example. Videos on freecodecamp with a full explanation take from 1.5 to 7 hours. Most importantly, the video should contain a detailed explanation of how to make a finished application from start to finish using Directus and the popular frontend framework.
In addition to freecodecamp, there are other training channels that will want to host training materials with a link to you in the video description. You just need to create interesting educational content for them.
Strapi also actively participates in many conferences on React and Vue. The guys make a newsletter about this in weekly subscribsions and post news on their website. In turn, at these conferences, Strapi is also mentioned as an information sponsor, and many developers learn about this product at the conferences. An example of the recent conference "VueConf Toronto 2021".
It would also be nice to see the #MadeWithDirectus section on the main page of the site, where there will be news and descriptions of real projects in which Directus is already used in production.
And don't neglect email newsletters. They should be weekly. They should contain product news, major changes and plans. At the end of the letter, you can also include a list of open positions, the section like "We are hiring!".
@benhaynes @vadimmatkarimov Excellent feedback and information! Thank you!!!
Directus has come a long way! Never seen a team which is quite passionate about the product for so long. Fortunate to be the part of development team. Congratulations and all the best 🎉
@theharshin Thank you! Our team, contributors and community help make everyday fun and interesting :)
@theharshin Thank you, Harsh, that really means a lot. We're so thankful for you and the rest of our amazing contributors... can't wait to see where we can take the platform from here! 💪
Congrats on the launch!
I've been using Directus for a while. What an amazing tool to interact with your database.
@tat_thien Thank you! Amazing community makes the product and experience great :)
@tat_thien Excellent!! One of our biggest focuses in Directus 9 has been "database abstraction", so proud that we now support all SQL vendors in this version. Any thoughts about other database-specific features you'd like to see?
Congrats to the @directus team! What a stellar, beautiful and versatile platform. And OPEN-SOURCE?! Incredible work!
@directus @meagan_campol Thank you! 💖 We're big believers in true open-source, and are very excited to continue sharing the Directus platform with our community completely free. 😊
@w0kyj @pradeeb28 it seems the payment is per project. It should be per team. I tried to create 2 projects, one demo and one empty, and they are asking for payment already.
@pradeeb28 apologies for any confusion. Our standard cloud is charged per project. Each account gets one(1) project 14-day free trial. Self hosted projects are available completely free and open-source. Hope this helps.
@pradeeb28 @hendrik_jap Hey Hendrik - our cloud solutions are charged at the project level. Each account gets one(1) project 14-day free trial. Self hosted projects are available completely free and open-source. Hope this helps.
@eugene_stepnov Directus has a very userfriendly ui, it's completely opensource, very easy to customize for every usecase and you don't have to touch any SQL at all. And these are just a few things I came up with right now.
@eugene_stepnov Some of the benefits I hear from our community are the dynamic APIs (REST + GraphQL) that mirror the database and allow for integration with any internal/external systems, Front-End frameworks(REACT, NuxtJs, NextJs, Vue, ...), etc. The no-code Admin App allows non-technical users to manage content and data in the database. As @nitwel noted, there are many benefits and they definitely won't all fit here. Hope that helps.
@eugene_stepnov I love differentiation questions, thanks, Eugene!
The biggest difference is that Directus is completely free and open-source, while Retool has many limitations and paywalls... even when self-hosting. Another big benefit of being open-source beyond pricing) is that you actually have control over the codebase and since it's built modularly, you can infinitely extend it. This means there is effectively no feature ceiling.
The second big one is our Connection Toolkit. Retool offers a rudimentary REST API Generator that you need to manually build from a CSV. Directus, by comparison, dynamically builds your REST and GraphQL APIs and automatically keeps them up-to-date based on any changes to your schema. We do this with an agnostic AST file, so Directus can also provide schema migrations, OpenAPI spec files, and more.
Also, while Directus is built for Developers, the Directus App is designed for non-technical users. This is a key difference, because you don't need to know SQL (or any query language) to build/filter data sets. Retool gives a nice abstraction layer... but still relies on SQL, and is therefore out of reach for the broader demographic.
Beyond these big ones, there are a multitude of other Enterprise-level features that we support, including: content workflows, multilingual/translation support, far more granular filter-based permissions, webhooks, event hooks, built-in auth (SSO, OIDC, OAuth2, AD, etc), digital asset management, and live image transformations.
I won't say there isn't a healthy amount of overlap on the App-Builder side, but Directus definitely supports a broader range of use-cases.
@d1sxeyes Thanks, Joe! Any big (or little) features you'd like to see added? We're compiling a list, and checking it twice! 🎅🏻
@benhaynes I know this is already on the radar, but would be great to see realtime data streaming - I have an app at the moment where I'm polling, switching to sockets or something would be super cool! 🎄
@benhaynes @d1sxeyes Hey Joe - be great to get your input and upvote on the feature here: https://github.com/directus/dire...
@d1sxeyes You know it! This is top three on my personal list of features to get implemented before the end of the year! Polling works, but nothing compares to realtime websockets and GraphQL Subscriptions!
Just thinking about this makes me want to dive in now! 😂
Congratulations @benhaynes and rest of the team!
I've been using Directus for just over a month now and hands down, it's the best CMS I have used so far. It's open source, easy to get started, extremely powerful and yet easy to use. REST and GraphQL APIs are very well thought out and a joy to use. Documentation is very extensive and helpful and has saved me lots of trouble when I was just starting out. It's going to be my go to CMS for the future projects.
@benhaynes I've seen kanban and timeline views in one of the screenshots. Are those coming soon?
@davor_pihac1 This comment really makes me happy — we've worked very hard to really focus on developer experience, so it's great to hear you're finding the API so intuitive! (though we're always working towards getting things even more polished up). 🙌
For the Layouts, the Timeline Layout is about 95% complete and will be added in the coming weeks to the new Notifications drawer and Activity Log (which is moving to Settings). We also have a sort of Gantt-style Layout coming (which you might be referring to) which is about 30% complete and should be out in the next 1-2 months. 📊
The Kanban Layout was actually just released yesterday!! It's our first Cloud Exclusive extension, but the plan here is to eventually move these exclusives into the open-source community marketplace so on-prem users can enjoy them too. We're still ironing out this flow, but plan to include as much as possible in the OSS Core/Marketplace. ✌️
I found Directus in early 2021, just after it entered the release candidate stage. I was searching for a platform that was fast, easy to use, headless, and javascript-based. I was willing to settle for anything as long as it gave me an escape route from Wordpress. To my surprise, I didn't have to settle at all. Directus provides me with all of the features I was looking for, and for anything it lacks (which isn't much), there are tons of tools for customizability.
I've been following the platform just shy of a year at this point, and it's only continued to get better. I'd like to see it eventually embrace a frontend templating and editing system, making it easier to stage websites. I feel like it'd be a great complement to the system, and help it further overtake the legacy competitors in the CMS space.
The design of Directus is icing on the cake. One thing I can't stand is when you can tell that a system was built by developers, not designers (if you're here, I'm sure you know what I mean). However, despite its developer-centric structure, you can tell it was not just built, it was designed. The UI design is beautiful, which is something you can't often say about dashboard-esque applications, and the UX design makes actions feel so simple that you don't need to be a programmer to have an idea of what you're doing.
I adamantly believe Directus 9 is the next step in the CMS landscape, it's not holding on to outdated ideas and techniques. Rather, it's moving forward in full-force, embracing new technologies, and setting a new precedent for what it means to be a CMS
@austin_fish I couldn't have said this better myself, thank you, Austin! ❤️ So happy to count you as one of our long-time users and community members!
The Front-End Templating is a really interesting feature to dive into. On one hand, we want to make sure we remain true to our "data" roots, and avoid painting ourselves exclusively as a CMS. And even within the CMS use-case, we aim to be headless, so it's hard to build website templates without thinking about support for other types of digital experiences and touchpoints.
That said, powering websites is a HUGE part of what we do, and we should embrace those that want to use a modern solution like Directus. I think the ideal path forward is to include a Module Extension (or even a robust Interface Extension) that allows a WYSIWYG template editor with an alternate code view for power-users. If we can allow this to output JSON in addition to HTML, that's an even bigger win.
This becomes a pretty opinionated direction, and we try to stay agnostic... but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't spent some time designing what our Template system would look like. That, combined with some ready-made integrations/webhooks for triggering an SSG Netlify build would be awesome!
I think the biggest advantage to this feature would be how we could have a really smart content auto-complete. So when you type "{{" (or whatever) you could get nice context menus for selecting the deeply nested relational data you want to inject or loop over... while still keeping the site dynamic.
Really cool stuff! 🤯
Thank you for this detailed and excellent review @austin_fish !! I can confirm that the team spends nearly as much time on design -- @benhaynes @nitwel @rijkvanzanten ... argue over pixel placement almost as often and heatedly as they do about eeking another millisecond of performance out of the APIs .. ;)
Members and users like you drive us to constantly improve and we appreciate all your contributions and feedback. Cheers!🍻
@benhaynes I agree that a Module could be effective in providing a frontend templating interface. In fact, over the last few months that's something I've very heavily put my time toward thinking up, with the intention of building. I'm still very much in the conceptualization stage, however, I have many ideas regarding a seamless path forward and I'd love to discuss them with you sometime! 😄
@austin_fish Always down to discuss (and offer some design mocks) over Discord!
Can I be cheeky and ask a few questions? I'm on mobile and it's a bit late to play.
Is the graphql a layer in front of the rest api?
Are websockets supported within graphql?
Are multiple databases supported in a single installation?
@ian_jamieson Cheeky is great and we love questions. I will answer the last two and ask @rijkvanzanten or @benhaynes to tag up on the first one.
- Websockets are not supported yet, but it is one of our current top priority features. Exciting possibilities once we have this implemented.
- Single database per project(e.g. directus instance), here again this a much requested feature and one on our planning map.
@ian_jamieson Haha, I had a whole response ready... and then the team swooped in and gave better answers than I could have. 😂
What I can say is that I am pushing very hard to get websockets into the platform ASAP. I have some ideas for very cool features that rely on it, but more importantly, it's a crucial requirement of project's that rely on realtime data.
As for multiple databases — we used to support this, but removed it to drastically simplify the core codebase. Are you asking regarding multitenancy?
@benhaynes haha. Yeah, I see a whole lot of answers. A single db with redis might be fine, I was thinking splitting things up. Like an shared auth db, one to handle millions of listings and another for page content. Regarding sockets, I've been experimenting with Hasura with a nextjs front-end and enjoy getting data via a normal query or subscription. It's just setting up the Apollo config with the api url and ws url. I'll give directus a spin tomorrow in docker.
@ian_jamieson Awesome! We just passed 12M Docker pulls a couple days ago... so you'll be in good company! 🐳
You can certainly use different databases for separation of concerns... or just soft partition that data with roles/permissions. We try to stay unopinionated and offer multiple options whenever possible... so you have choices. Also, it's worth noting that we've been looking into multiple-database support (though we're a ways out from that still), mostly as a way to completely isolate our system tables from your content tables.
Let us know how your PoC goes... would love to hear your feedback!
This tool is so Amazing! that I decided to join the team.
As a consumer point of view, I have tried so many tools to manage app content but they always lack some feature I needed, mainly linking relationships. But when I tried Directus everything changed. Everything is so easy, from setup to manage data.
As a member of the team, I can only say that we always try to do things the better way and it's super awesome to have friends around the globe.
If you want a great tool to manage your data, search no more.
@joselcvarela José!! We couldn't be happier to have such an amazing engineer on the team — thank you! While it's not easy coordinating meetings with 6-12 hour time differences, we wouldn't trade it for anything. We're so lucky to have such a passionate international team spread around the whole world! 🌍 💙
I've been using Directus for the past 6 months as a CMS and it's be amazing! No issues at all, even in during the release candidate phase. Highly recommend to anyone looking for a good quality CMS.
Thank you @akrantz01 ! Our community is our backbone and we are grateful to have you as part of it. Let us know what we can do better :)
@akrantz01 That's great to hear!! Transitioning from a pre-release (RC) to General Availability is always tricky... I'm so happy to hear this has been a seamless process for you!
Despite not having any issues — are there any awesome features you'd like us to add to our dev wishlist? 🤔
@benhaynes The two biggest features on my wishlist were already added: headers in webhooks and SSO support. Though it is worth noting that we are still running on RC 85 😬, so I'm sure many of the things I've been looking for already exist. We're looking to upgrade for v9 in the next couple of weeks.
@akrantz01 Haha, welp, we're here to help you get on a GA release of Directus whenever works for you! With the popularity of SSG websites, anything that can improve webhooks is a great idea in my book!
Any specific SSO options you were looking for?
@benhaynes I was primarily looking for ad-hoc user creation. I ended up writing a hook that to do it for me, but it is super hacky. The other thing was the ability to disable email and password login entirely, or redirect the email through the external IdP.
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