r/emdash_cms

Frontman is for a specific problem: AI coding agents often edit frontend files without seeing the running app, built for technical people.

Why try it:

- select/click UI before asking for edits

- agent gets DOM, screenshot, logs, routes, source mappings

- works with Astro, Next.js, Vite, WordPress

- open source

Latest release added Astro content collections support.
And it's fully OSS, self hostable etc

Repo: https://github.com/frontman-ai/frontman

Wanted to see if self-hosting EmDash on a cheap VPS was actually worth the setup compared to the managed Cloudflare route.

Tldr:

• Admin UI speed: Way snappier. Instant saves without the D1 write latency hiccups.
• Node 22 vs 24: Bumping to Node 24 in the Dockerfile gave ~38% more throughput under load (tested with oha).
• Stack: Caddy reverse proxy -> Node container -> Postgres 18 -> Bunny S3 for media (keeps the VPS lightweight and safe).

Put together the full Docker Compose setup, Caddy config, and resource benchmark graphs in a video if anyone’s looking to move away from WordPress.
https://youtu.be/w4FuWn5ybbY?si=e1AW5Kcd4M2VlDu3