Hello Netlify Team,
this might be a dumb question, but I did not find it currently in the docs at a first watch.
Is it possible to access my collection objects per REST API (headless) by an external web app.
For example, I need all published posts from the demo site: Netlify CMS Development Test
I played a little bit with the urls but did not find an endpoint to fetch the posts (example) as json.
Is this possible, how will this endpoint look like?
Many thanks and kind regards,
Andre
Hi @escv, Netlify CMS is a headless CMS which means it runs completely in the browser, so it can’t expose a REST API.
The content is usually saved in a git repo (for example a GitHub repo), so you can use the relevant git provider API to retrieve content.
As for https://cms-demo.netlify.com/ the content on the demo site is generated and stored in the browser memory. You can access it via window.repoFiles
You answer indicates that the term headless means that a CMS runs in the browser which is not true however Netlify CMS’ Admin Panel runs in the browser. Typically a headless CMS does provide a REST API that can be accessed by a http client to fetch its content.
Not quite. Headless means decoupling the backend from the frontend, which both REST API’s and Netlify CMS do. They just do it in different ways. Netlify is truly headless, it knows absolutely nothing about the static site it’s feeding content. It does not, however, provide a REST API to expose that content.