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Can I use Payload as a traditional CMS for an Express website?
you know like the old days... before frontend frameworks... I'm basically looking for a CMS that I can add to my Express website to handle Admin CRUD and provide me with a local API to work with. I'm currently in the process of testing Payload on an Express website and it seems to be working.. I did some tweaking.. changed admin routes and put my own app routes.. added some libraries like handlebars and others... and so far so good.. but I wanted to make sure that I'm not missing anything. Is it doable? cause I haven't really seen anybody using it like that on the net..
Totally doable. And in fact, if you follow the "Adding to an existing app" section of our docs (
https://payloadcms.com/docs/getting-started/installation#adding-to-an-existing-app), you'll have a set up that's basically on par with starting with a fresh
create-payload-appHonestly I think the only reason that set up isn't very common is just because FE frameworks are super popular and not as many people are familiar with setting up routes and everything in Express. Sounds like you know what you're doing, so I'd say you're on the right track!
Alright thanks. Yk I keep thinking to myself there must be something I'm missing.. since i haven't seen any examples on this use case. I think there should be like a tutorial or something for implementing it that way.
The closest example we have I think would be the
custom-serverexample, which adds Nextjs into an Express server, but there's an
ejectto remove the Nextjs stuff from it.
https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/tree/main/examples/custom-server
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