Is nesta free to use?

nesta is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What is nesta written in?

nesta is primarily written in Ruby. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/gma/nesta, and it has 899 GitHub stars.

nesta: Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS)

nesta is a free, open source content management systems (cms) project written in Ruby and released under MIT. It has 899 GitHub stars, 121 forks and 5 open issues, and was last pushed 3 months ago. On this registry it ranks #52 of 66 tracked projects in Content Management Systems (CMS), with 5 head-to-head comparisons available.

File Based CMS and Static Site Generator

Nesta is a lightweight CMS for building content sites and blogs, written in Ruby using the Sinatra web framework.

Write your content in Markdown or Textile, in your text editor (drop into HTML or Haml if you need more control)
Files are stored in text files on your hard drive (there is no database)
Publish changes by putting these files online (Git recommended, not required)
Deploy either as a static site (SSG) or by rendering HTML on the server (SSR)

Installation

Begin by installing Ruby, then the Nesta gem:

$ gem install nesta

Use the nesta command to generate a new site:

$ nesta new mysite.com --git  # a git repo is optional, but recommended

Install a few dependencies, and you're away:

$ cd mysite.com
$ bundle

You'll find configuration options for your site in config/config.yml. The defaults will work, but you'll want to tweak it before you go very far.

That's it — you can launch a local web server in development mode using the mr-sparkle dev server:

$ bundle exec mr-sparkle config.ru

Point your web browser at http://localhost:8080. Start editing the files in content/pages (see the docs on writing content for full instructions).

You can either deploy it behind a web server, or build a static version of your site:

$ nesta build  # but see config.yml for build settings

Support

There's plenty of information on . If you need some help with anything feel free to file an issue, or contact me on Mastodon (@[email protected]).

Contributing

If you want to add a new feature, consider creating an issue so we can have a chat before you start coding. I might be able to chip in with ideas on how to approach it, or suggest that we implement it as a plugin (to keep Nesta itself lean and simple).

-- Graham