About
A CMS with a long-term view
Chinaski exists because publishing a website shouldn't mean signing up for a decade of forced upgrades, subscriptions, and broken builds.
View on GitHubWhat Chinaski is
A static-site CMS
Chinaski manages your content in a structured database, then builds it into flat HTML. The editing experience is rich; the production server is just a file server.
Open source and self-hosted
The code is on GitHub. You run it on hardware you own. There is no hosted version, no freemium tier, and no company that can change the terms of your access.
Built to last
Nine production dependencies, all in Debian stable. Perl as the runtime — backward-compatible for 30 years. Software designed to be understandable and maintainable a decade from now.
The project
Why it was built
Every popular CMS eventually asks you to accept a tradeoff: complexity for flexibility, subscriptions for features, or fragility for modernity. Chinaski starts from the premise that none of those tradeoffs are necessary for most websites.
Who it's for
Developers and technical operators who want to own their stack. People who've spent too long debugging plugin conflicts, fighting upgrade cycles, or paying for features they don't use. Anyone who needs a website that works in five years without intervention.
What it doesn't do
Chinaski is not a hosted service. It doesn't have a marketplace, a plugin ecosystem, or a theme store. It's a focused tool that does one thing well: turn structured content into a fast, secure, static website.
The project status
Chinaski is in active development and production use. The source is on GitHub. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. There is no roadmap driven by investor milestones.
Explore the documentation
Complete setup, theming, and API documentation lives at docs.chinaski.net.
Read the documentation