Git-Based CMS: When a Website Without a Database Fits

A git-based CMS stores your website's content as files in a Git repository instead of a database. An admin panel edits those files and commits the changes through the GitHub API, then the host rebuilds the site. A website without a database has nothing to secure, patch or pay for on the data side, and every edit is a commit you can roll back. It suits sites where a few editors change the content, and it is a poor fit where visitors create it.

What is a git-based CMS?

A traditional CMS answers each request by querying a database and building the page. WordPress, for example, recommends PHP plus MySQL or MariaDB. A git-based CMS removes the database from the picture. Content lives in JSON, Markdown or YAML files in your repository, the build step turns those files into pages ahead of time, and the host serves the finished pages from a CDN.

Editors still get a normal admin interface. Decap CMS is an open-source example. Its documentation describes a React app that wraps the Git workflow, keeps content in your repository and works with GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. You can also write your own admin, which is the route we took.

How does danubelabs.net work without a database?

The site runs on Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, Tailwind 4 and TypeScript. Every page, service, project and blog post is a JSON file in the Git repository. Appointments live in Google Calendar, as described in our booking article, so no database exists anywhere in the stack.

Content is JSON with a field per language

Every user-facing text field is an object with an en and a ro key. This is a trimmed entry from the services file:

{
  "slug": "web-development",
  "title": { "en": "Web development", "ro": "Dezvoltare web" },
  "group": "build",
  "published": true
}

A small function resolves a whole object tree for one locale when a page renders. Fields that must not be translated, such as slugs and prices, are marked in the schema. The admin forms are generated from that same schema, so a new field needs no new form code.

The save path

1. An editor changes a field in /admin and presses save.
2. The admin calls a storage layer with two backends: the local disk in development, and the GitHub Contents API in production. Two environment variables, a token and a repository name, switch it.
3. The API call creates a commit on the main branch. GitHub's endpoint needs a commit message, the file content in Base64 and, for an update, the SHA of the file being replaced.
4. Netlify sees the commit and rebuilds the site.
5. The new pages go live in both languages.

What are the benefits of a website without a database?

• No database to secure, patch, back up or pay for. Fewer moving parts means fewer things to break at 3 a.m. and a smaller attack surface on the data layer.
• Full history and rollback. Each admin save is a commit with a message and an author. To undo a bad edit, revert that commit.
• Free hosting. danubelabs.net runs on Netlify's free tier. Pre-built pages need little compute.
• Speed. Pages are generated ahead of time and served from a CDN. The home and contact pages score 100 in all four Lighthouse categories: performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
• Review and branching. Content changes can go through branches and pull requests like code, if you want an approval step.
• Portability. Your content is plain files you already hold. There is no export step and no vendor to ask.

Cost is part of the story too. We cover what a site costs in Romania, including hosting and maintenance, in how much a website costs in 2026.

What are the limits of a git-based CMS?

Build minutes run out

Netlify's free tier counts builds against a monthly allowance. On our account that is 300 build minutes. Every admin save and every media upload is a commit, and every commit is a build. This year the minutes ran out once. Deploys stopped without any failure message, and the builds skipped during the outage were not retried after the reset, so we had to trigger a fresh build by hand.

Newer Netlify accounts use credits instead. According to Netlify's billing docs, the Free plan has a hard limit of 300 credits a month and a production deploy costs 15 credits, which allows at most 20 production deploys a month. Check which model your account uses.

The fix is to stop building when nothing visible changed. Netlify skips a deploy when the commit message contains [skip ci] or [skip netlify]:

git commit -m "Update internal notes [skip ci]"

The next commit without the marker builds everything, including the skipped changes. We use the marker on notes-only commits, and contact-form submissions already carry it. Media uploads are the next place to apply it, because an image does not change the rendered site until a page references it.

Writes are not instant

A save is live only after the commit, the build and the deploy finish. Build time depends on your site, so measure your own deploys. If editors need to see a change within seconds, a database-backed CMS or a headless SaaS CMS fits better.

No user-generated content at scale

Comments, reviews, user accounts, forums and carts create data all day. Every write would be a commit and a build. Keep that data in a database or a service built for it.

Concurrent edits and large files

An update must quote the SHA of the version it replaces, so two people saving the same file at the same moment is a conflict you have to handle. Git does not hide it. GitHub's contents endpoint also supports all features only for files up to 1 MB, accepts raw media types between 1 and 100 MB and refuses anything larger. Keep images small and keep them out of the content files.

Shops with live stock

Stock levels, prices and orders change by the minute and by visitor action. That is database work. A git-based CMS can hold the product descriptions, and a shop service or database should hold everything that changes at checkout.

Git-based CMS vs WordPress vs headless SaaS CMS

Who is a git-based CMS right for?

It fits company and marketing sites, portfolios, documentation, blogs with a handful of editors and bilingual brochure sites. These sites change a few times a week, by people you know, and they gain the most from speed, history and free hosting.

It fits badly with marketplaces, membership sites, forums, shops with live stock and any site with hundreds of editors or content that must go live within seconds. If you are unsure, list who creates content and how often it changes. When the answer is visitors, or every few seconds, choose a database.

How do you build a site like this?

1. Pick a framework that builds pages ahead of time, such as Next.js.
2. Model your content as JSON or Markdown with a schema, one file per page or item, with a field per language if the site is bilingual.
3. Add an admin. Decap CMS gives you one off the shelf, and a custom admin gives you full control over forms and permissions.
4. Connect the repository to a host that deploys on every commit.
5. Decide the commit rules: which saves should build, and which should carry [skip ci].

If your admin can live elsewhere, for example Decap CMS signing editors in through their Git provider, the site itself can stay a pure static export. In Next.js that is one setting:

// next.config.js
const nextConfig = {
  output: 'export',
}
module.exports = nextConfig

The Next.js docs list what a static export cannot use: Incremental Static Regeneration, Server Actions, Proxy and the default image loader are all unavailable. Our admin has server routes that hold the GitHub token and write commits, so danubelabs.net runs on Netlify's Next.js runtime instead.

Want a site like this?

Danube Labs builds bilingual, database-free sites with an admin your team can use, hosted in your own repository and hosting account. You can see the result in the danubelabs.net case study, read what we build on the web development page, or book a free intro call to check whether a git-based CMS fits your site.