Tanam 🌱 A plug n play CMS for Firebase

Tanam is a free CMS; both free as in FOSS and as in free ice cream 🍦

DISCLAIMER

Tanam is currently in a very early development stage. It is NOT production ready.

Get involved if something isn't working. We are happily receiving pull requests.

Create an issue if you find a bug. But no feature requests please.

Use at your own risk.

Problem statement

Building a website for content creation such as personal blog or even for a business with regular updates can be unnecessary complicated or expensive.

Some of the most popular CMS platforms requires to be hosted on a VPS or a cloud hosting offer that both will set you back a few dollars per month and in the case of VPS it will probably come with a fairly poor performance.

Static websites are increasingly popular for the of performance of serving time. But they are on the other hand relatively difficult to maintain for a non-technical content creators.

Firebase is a suite of services that offers all elements necessary to serve a CMS... and at virtually infinitly high performance.

What is Tanam

Tanam is built and fully powered by Firebase. It allows you to host your own CMS completely free both free as in FOSS and as in free ice cream 🍦

Tanam is providing a platform with dynamic content (server side rendered) with static site performance straight out of the box. It's a auto-scaling platform that will work just as well for small personal sites as it will also be able to serve heavy load without breaking a sweat.

Tanam is leveraging Google's global CDN to deliver pre-built versions of your dynamic content. All cached content is immediately replaced as you update it. Since we are pre-building the content, all your URLs will serve instantly as a static website would. Performance only depends on the size of your page.

The word tanam means "to plant" in Indonesian language. The name comes from the seed of thought that this project was for about a year before inception. Also because the leading design guidelines for building Tanam is: using the CMS should be as easy as planting the seed and then nurture your site with good content and just watch it grow and scale by itself.

For anyone exposed to use Tanam, either as a developer that is building a site or a content creator who is sharing creative works, we want to provide an easy to use platform that allows you to simply create a platform for sharing your thoughts.

Does it really cost nothing?

Hosting Tanam can cost you as little as nothing. Firebase has a very generous pricing model with a free tier that is more than enough for most Tanam sites.

You must still put your project into the Blaze plan, since we're using outgoing HTTP requests to pre-heat your website's cache. The good thing about the Blaze plan is that it still won't cost you anythingi unless you go over the free tier quotas.

Tanam is using fairly little database and cloud function resources since content is only updated on demand, and as the owner of your website you and your team are the only users that create content.

How do I get Tanam

Setting up Tanam for the first time requires a bit of Firebase knowledge.

Firebase console

First, you need to set some things up in the Firebase console. Create a Firebase project for your new CMS site (or choose an existing).

1. Enable Google Auth - Enable Google Authentication and follow the instructions.
2. Enable Firestore - the first time after you have created a Firebase project, you need to create a Firestore database for Tanam. Go to "Database" in the Firebase console and click "Create Database"
3. Set up hosting - this step is optional, but you will most likely want to connect you own domain to your Firebase project. Go to "Hosting" in the Firebase console and click "Get started" and follow the instructions.
4. Switch to Blaze Plan - Tanam requires the project to be on Blaze plan for the cache management.
5. Add web app - get the Firebase web config by adding a web app from the project dashboard or go ot the settings page. You will need this configuration later when you setup your project.

If you choose to not connect a custom domain, your website will only be available on the default hosting domain: https://your-project-id.firebaseapp.com/

Setting up your project and its code

This section explains how you can set up a new Tanam project from scratch. You can also fork the tanam-starter project and skip most of the steps that are already preconfigured for you. If you do that, you can practically skip directly to step 6.

1. Install Firebase CLI: firebase-tools
2. Run firebase init and follow the instructions
   1. Enable all features (realtime database, firestore, hosting, functions, cloud storage)
   2. Use TypeScript for your functions
   3. Rewrite all URLs to index.html
3. Delete all files in your public/ folder. You can put a .gitkeep there to make sure it exists
4. Edit firebase.json and replace the rewrite to index.html with a rewrite to the tanam cloud function.

"rewrites": [
    {
    "source": "**",
    "function": "tanam"
    }
]

5. Add NPM dependency tanam@latest
6. Copy paste the code below into your index.ts file.
   1. Replace (and add any) email that should have access to the site. You can assign the roles (owner, admin, publisher) for different access of content. Make sure that at least someone is the "owner".
   2. Replace the firebaseApp with your own web configuration that you got when adding a web app in the Firebase console

import * as tanam from 'tanam';

tanam.initializeApp({
    users: {
        "your.email@gmail.com": "owner",
    },
    firebaseApp: {
        apiKey: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
        authDomain: "your-project-id.firebaseapp.com",
        databaseURL: "https://your-project-id.firebaseio.com",
        projectId: "your-project-id",
        storageBucket: "your-project-id.appspot.com",
        messagingSenderId: "0123456789"
    },
});

export * from 'tanam';