Tell HN: Maybe you don't need a CMS | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Maybe you don't need a CMS

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It's obviously won't work for everyone, but after being thoroughly frustrated with Strapi CMS last night, I realized I could write a few lambdas. With API gateway you can serve the lambda response directly, so I basically upload assets to S3, and have my first lambda return a list of those assets, and provide secondary links to access them. Then I have a couple of lambdas which will either return json data or binary assets ( signed urls so the objects aren't public ) depending on what type of asset I'm trying to get back.

It was like an eureka moment when I realized I could vastly simplify my workflow by doing this, my only concern right now is this simply won't scale. Listing hundreds of AWS bucket items does not sound like a fun time, but before I get to that I can always add something like a dynamodb table which keeps track of the items for me.

I highly recommend this approach if you're developing something like a video game and you need a quick and dirty backend for prototyping. For my project I should be the only user who actually needs to upload data, so just dropping the files directly on S3 works extremely well. I can also add a basic front end to upload the files to S3 if needed.

> I highly recommend this approach if you're developing something like a video game and you need a quick and dirty backend for prototyping.

No CMS that I know of (and certainly not Strapi) is designed for prototyping video games... there are purpose-built solutions for that[1]. Strapi and its competitors are for people building static sites and very simple CRUD applications.

There are now also mature platforms like Directus[2] that are less about content and would probably work for your use-case as well, in addition to being more suited for CRUD apps than Strapi would be.

Your solution doesn't really sound like it makes sense anyway. You don't need a lambda to list S3 assets because the S3 API already does that for you (faster and for free).

I think the tl;dr from your post is that you tried to use a hammer to turn a screw, and now you think hammers are not as useful as people say they are.

1. https://playfab.com/

2. https://directus.io/

Ah, I left out a key point. I need to do some specific operations using some AWS services which is why I went the route I did.

>You don't need a lambda to list S3 assets because the S3 API already does that for you (faster and for free).

I also do a bit of light data processing here( as in gathering some data from other sources, to create aggregate data objects), I'd rather drive this from a web service versus invoking S3 directly from Unity.

I wrote this post after fighting Strapi for 2 days and it still not doing what I want. I might consider playfab in the future, but since I do depend on some AWS services I might be stuck with what I'm doing.

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