ElmapiCMS 4.0 – Self-Hosted Headless CMS for Building Content APIs

 

ElmapiCMS is a modern, self-hosted headless CMS that lets you design your content structure in a clean admin panel and instantly deliver it to any website, mobile app or frontend framework through a powerful REST API. Version 4.0 is built on Laravel 13, Inertia v2 + React 19 and Tailwind CSS 4, and adds frontend authentication, content versioning and more.

 

Run unlimited projects from a single installation, keep full control of your data on your own server, and give your team a fast, intuitive editing experience.

 

Key Features

 

  - Multi-project – manage many separate projects (each with its own collections, assets, locales and API settings) from one install.

 

  - Visual content modeling – create collections and drag-and-drop fields: text, long text, rich text, slug, number, boolean, date, time, email, password, color, enumeration, JSON, media and relations.

 

  - REST API – endpoints for collections, entries, files and webhooks, with filtering, sorting and pagination, project API tokens (Laravel Sanctum) and an optional public read API.

 

  - End-user authentication – signup, sign-in, token refresh, logout and optional email verification for your frontend users, with session, API-key, user suspension and audit-log management.

 

  - Content versioning – draft and published states, immutable publish versions, draft saves on published entries and a version history for every entry.

 

  - Translations / localization – multilingual content at entry level with per-project locales.

 

  - Built-in AI tools – write, rewrite and translate content in the editor using your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini API key.

 

  - MCP ready – ready-to-copy configuration for connecting AI editors such as Cursor and Claude Code through the official ElmapiCMS MCP server.

 

  - Asset library – upload and manage images and files, with local or S3-compatible storage.

 

  - Webhooks – notify external services on content changes, with delivery logs.

 

  - Import / Export – move projects and collections between environments with portable packages, plus project and collection templates.

 

  - Users, roles & permissions – role-based access control (spatie/laravel-permission) and per-project user access for content editors.

 

  - Customizable admin – app settings, theme and appearance options (light/dark), and a modern, responsive React admin panel.

 

  - Web installer – browser-based setup wizard (requirements check, database test, .env setup, migrations).

 

Requirements

 

  - PHP 8.4 or newer

 

  - PHP extensions: bcmath, ctype, curl, dom, fileinfo, filter, gd, intl, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo, pdo_mysql, session, tokenizer, xml, zip

 

  - MySQL 8+ or MariaDB 10.6+

 

  - Apache (with mod_rewrite) or Nginx

 

  - Writable storage/ and bootstrap/cache/ folders

 

  - Optional: cron or supervisor for queued jobs (webhooks)

 

What’s Included

 

  - Full ElmapiCMS 4.0 source code (Laravel + React)

 

  - vendor/ folder with all PHP dependencies – no Composer needed

 

  - Pre-built admin frontend (public/build) – no npm/Node needed

 

  - Ready SQL database dump (database/elmapicms.sql)

 

  - The vendor’s original web installer package (elmapicmsInstaller.zip)

 

  - Step-by-step INSTALL.txt guide for shared hosting/cPanel and VPS

 

Installation Summary

 

  - Upload and extract elmapicms-4.0-ready.zip, then point your domain’s document root to the elmapicms/public folder.

 

  - Create a MySQL/MariaDB database and user.

 

  - Import database/elmapicms.sql with phpMyAdmin, or run php artisan migrate --seed --force.

 

  - Copy .env.example to .env and set APP_URL and your database details.

 

  - Generate the application key (php artisan key:generate) and run php artisan storage:link.

 

  - Open your domain and log in.

 

Prefer a wizard? Use the included web installer instead – it checks requirements, writes .env, runs migrations and creates your own admin account.

 

Default Admin Login

 

Email: admin@admin.com

Password: password

 

Important: change this password immediately after your first login.