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qino

298 words

hello-world.md

Announcing qino, the flat-file CMS that turns Markdown into TypeScript.

Charly Martin

Charly Martin

Founder @ qino

qino is live 🚀

If your website's content lives in Markdown files, you probably know the routine. It starts with a few fs.readFileSync calls and ends with a small, fragile content layer that nobody wants to touch.

The problem

Markdown is a great way to write content. Reading it back is the annoying part:

  • fs imports scattered across the codebase
  • paths built by hand
  • stripping extensions to get slugs
  • stitching related files together manually (a post and its author, say)
  • no guarantee the frontmatter matches what your code expects

Each piece is small, but together they add up to glue code that breaks quietly.

What qino does

qino is a headless CMS library that sits on top of your content folder. Your repo stays the source of truth: no database, no hosted backend. Content moves with your code through branches, PRs and tags.

You describe your content once:

const postCollection = qino.defineCollection({
  directory: "/posts",
  extension: ".md",
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    author: z.string(),
    categories: z.array(z.string()),
  }),
  relations: {
    author: authorCollection,
    "categories[*]": categoryCollection,
  },
  views: (view) => ({
    default: view({ resolveRelations: 1 }),
  }),
});

Then you query it like an API:

await postCollection.getEntries();

// [
//   {
//     title: "Hello world",
//     author: { name: "Camille Laurent" },
//     _meta: { slug: "hello-world" },
//   },
//   ...
// ]

Highlights

  • Query, don't read. Collections give you entries, not file paths.
  • Relations. Link files together like you would in a SQL database. A post's author resolves to the full author entry.
  • Type-safe. Schemas (Zod or any Standard Schema validator) give you fully inferred types, from the file on disk to your component.
  • Views. Expose named shapes of the same content, e.g. a withReadingTime view that augments posts.
  • CLI. Lint definitions, validate content and generate types as part of your build.
  • Framework-agnostic. Works anywhere Node.js 22+ runs.

In practice

I installed qino on my personal website and I'm super happy with the result. No more fs imports, building paths manually, extension path replacement or stitching files together by hand. The content layer shrank to a few collection definitions.

Try it

If this sounds useful, give it a try and let me know if it helped!