Payload CMS & Astro

PayloadCMS is a headless open-source content management system that can be used to provide content for your Astro project.

Integrating with Astro

Prerequisites

An Astro project - If you don’t have an Astro project yet, our Installation guide will get you up and running in no time.
A MongoDB database - PayloadCMS will ask you for a MongoDB connection string when creating a new project. You can set one up locally or use MongoDBAtlas to host a database on the web for free.
A PayloadCMS REST API - Create a PayloadCMS project and connect it to your MongoDB database during the setup.

Configuring Astro for your PayloadCMS collection

Your Payload project template will contain a file called Posts.ts in src/collections/. If you did not choose a template during installation that created a content collection for you, you can create a new Payload CMS Collection by adding this configuration file manually. The example below shows this file for a collection called posts that requires title, content, and slug fields:

import { CollectionConfig } from "payload/types";

const Posts: CollectionConfig = {
  slug: "posts",
  admin: {
    useAsTitle: "title",
  },
  access: {
    read: () => true,
  },

  fields: [
    {
      name: "title",
      type: "text",
      required: true,
    },
    {
      name: "content",
      type: "text",
      required: true,
    },
    {
      name: "slug",
      type: "text",
      required: true,
    },
  ],
};

export default Posts;

Import and add both Users (available in all PayloadCMS projects) and any other collections (e.g. Posts) to the available collections in the payload.config.ts file.

import { buildConfig } from "payload/config";
import path from "path";

import Users from "./collections/Users";
import Posts from "./collections/Posts";

export default buildConfig({
  serverURL: "http://localhost:4321",
  admin: {
    user: Users.slug,
  },
  collections: [Users, Posts],
  typescript: {
    outputFile: path.resolve(__dirname, "payload-types.ts"),
  },
  graphQL: {
    schemaOutputFile: path.resolve(__dirname, "generated-schema.graphql"),
  },
});

This will make a new collection called “Posts” appear in your PayloadCMS Dashboard next to the “Users” collection.

Enter the “Posts” collection and create a new post. After saving it, you will notice the API URL appear in the bottom right corner.

With the dev server running, open http://localhost:4321/api/posts in your browser. You should see a JSON file containing the post you have created as an object.

{
  "docs":[
      {
        "id":"64098b16483b0f06a7e20ed4",
        "title":"Astro & PayloadCMS Title 🚀",
        "content":"Astro & PayloadCMS Content",
        "slug":"astro-payloadcms-slug",
        "createdAt":"2023-03-09T07:30:30.837Z",
        "updatedAt":"2023-03-09T07:30:30.837Z"
      }
  ],
  "totalDocs":1,
  "limit":10,
  "totalPages":1,
  "page":1,
  "pagingCounter":1,
  "hasPrevPage":false,
  "hasNextPage":false,
  "prevPage":null,
  "nextPage":null
}

Fetching Data

Fetch your PayloadCMS data through your site’s unique REST API URL and the route for your content. (By default, PayloadCMS will mount all routes through /api.) Then, you can render your data properties using Astro’s set:html="" directive.

Together with your post, PayloadCMS will return some top-level metadata. The actual documents are nested within the docs array.

For example, to display a list of post titles and their content:

---
import HomeLayout from "../layouts/HomeLayout.astro";

const res = await fetch("http://localhost:5000/api/posts") // http://localhost:4321/api/posts by default
const posts = await res.json()
---

<HomeLayout title='Astro Blog'>
  {
    posts.docs.map((post) => (
        <h2 set:html={post.title} />
        <p set:html={post.content} />
    ))
  }
</HomeLayout>

Building a blog with PayloadCMS and Astro

Create a blog index page src/pages/index.astro to list each of your posts with a link to its own page.

Fetching via the API returns an array of objects (posts) that include, among others, the following properties:

title
content
slug

---
import HomeLayout from "../layouts/HomeLayout.astro";

const res = await fetch("http://localhost:5000/api/posts") // http://localhost:4321/api/posts by default
const posts = await res.json()
---

<HomeLayout title='Astro Blog'>
  <h1>Astro + PayloadCMS 🚀</h1>
  <h2>Blog posts list:</h2>
  <ul>
    {
      posts.docs.map((post) =>(
        <li>
          <a href={`posts/${post.slug}`} set:html={post.title} />
        </li>
      ))
    }
  </ul>
</HomeLayout>

Using the PayloadCMS API to generate pages

Create a page src/pages/posts/[slug].astro to dynamically generate a page for each post.

---
import PostLayout from "../../layouts/PostLayout.astro"

const {title, content} = Astro.props

// The getStaticPaths() is required for static Astro sites.
// If using SSR, you will not need this function.
export async function getStaticPaths() {
    let data = await fetch("http://localhost:5000/api/posts")
    let posts = await data.json()

    return posts.docs.map((post) => {
        return {
            params: {slug: post.slug},
            props: {title: post.title, content: post.content},
        };
    });
}
---
<PostLayout title={title}>
    <article>
        <h1 set:html={title} />
        <p set:html={content} />
    </article>
</PostLayout>

Publishing your site

To deploy your site visit our deployment guide and follow the instructions for your preferred hosting provider.

Community Resources

Try this Payload CMS & Astro Template.
Check out Astroad for easy development and VPS deployment with Docker.