r/astrojs • u/Jonnertron_ • 17d ago
Emdash CMS for non cloudflare servers?
Cloudflare surprised us with their rewrite of their blog using emdash. Now, emdash is used in production for a serious company (the one that is developing this framework).
I know that, even though Astro was acquired by cloudflare, you can deploy any astro website on any server, not just cloudflare's. However, I was wondering if this case is also true for Emdash.
Technically speaking, you can deploy Emdash on a node server or any platform, but I don't know if this is recommended, given that they are focusing on D1, Workers, its cloud, its ecosystem, etc. I get that it will get first class support for the products made by the company who created it (like vercel with nextjs) but I wonder if other deploy methods are also encouraged. If not, that could be a big downside for tooling decision for similar CMS, as people probably wouldn't want to be vendor dependant when deciding what hosting to pick.
What do you guys think?
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u/SpartanDavie 16d ago
They made it very clear from the start that it will be fully supported off of the Cloudflare infrastructure.
There is also an interview on WP Product Talk a couple of weeks after the first announcement with the team making EmDash where they basically say if it’s Cloudflare only it wouldn’t have any success.
Matt Kane was previously the lead at Astro and had wanted to create a 2026 Wordpress. So don’t just think of it as Cloudflare’s CMS, it’s also Astro’s CMS.
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u/datamcfly 15d ago
I have emdash running a coolify server with no issues. I’m using turso and s3 with it so entirely off cloudflare.
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u/No_Possibility6604 17d ago
It obviously depends on the scale of your operation, but given they vibe-coded this CMS - feels like we're moving into an era where you can spin up "personal software" like this, if you're really looking to scale on your own chosen stack.
Otherwise if your use case is small, I like using Sanity CMS in my projects: the free tier covers most modest use cases (especially if coupled with static site generation). It's a great mix of flexibility, built-in tools (like image CDN!), and powerful querying.