About Flare CMS
An open-source headless CMS built for the Cloudflare ecosystem.
The Story
Flare CMS started as a fork of SonicJS v2.8.0, an excellent headless CMS for Cloudflare Workers built by the SonicJS team. After months of building on top of it — adding collections, fixing bugs, deploying to production — the project had evolved enough to stand on its own.
In March 2026, four separate repositories were consolidated into a single pnpm monorepo, rebranded as Flare CMS, and deployed under the flarecms.dev domain.
Architecture
Flare CMS runs entirely on Cloudflare's edge network:
- Cloudflare Workers — The CMS backend (Hono web framework)
- D1 — SQLite database for content, collections, users, and workflow
- R2 — Object storage for media uploads (images, files)
- KV — Key-value cache for rate limiting and performance
- Pages — Astro 5 SSR frontend with edge rendering
No origin server, no cold starts, no scaling concerns. Content is served from 300+ edge locations globally with sub-50ms latency.
The Monorepo
Three packages, one repository:
- @flare-cms/core — The engine. Collections, API routes, admin UI, database schema, migrations. Built with tsup (8 entry points).
- @flare-cms/cms — The Cloudflare Worker backend. Collection configs, custom middleware, wrangler bindings.
- @flare-cms/site — The Astro frontend. SSR on Cloudflare Pages, consuming the CMS API.
Credits
Flare CMS is built on the shoulders of great open-source projects:
- SonicJS — The original CMS engine this project is forked from
- Hono — Ultrafast web framework for Cloudflare Workers
- Drizzle ORM — TypeScript ORM for D1/SQLite
- Astro — The web framework for content-driven websites
- Cloudflare Workers — The runtime that makes it all possible
Built By
Flare CMS is built and maintained by Jaime Aleman in El Paso, TX. It's MIT licensed and open source on GitHub.