Directus 9 - Instant no-code app and dynamic API for any SQL database

@benhaynes @kaushal_im Thank you! Feedback makes us stronger and better :)

@kaushal_im Hey Kaushal — great to see such a long-time user here! 👋 We've been working hard on Directus 9 and the accompanying (optional) Cloud service. Can't wait to give you a tour!

@eugene_stepnov Directus has a very userfriendly ui, it's completely opensource, very easy to customize for every usecase and you don't have to touch any SQL at all. And these are just a few things I came up with right now.

@eugene_stepnov @nitwel nide bro

@eugene_stepnov Some of the benefits I hear from our community are the dynamic APIs (REST + GraphQL) that mirror the database and allow for integration with any internal/external systems, Front-End frameworks(REACT, NuxtJs, NextJs, Vue, ...), etc. The no-code Admin App allows non-technical users to manage content and data in the database. As @nitwel noted, there are many benefits and they definitely won't all fit here. Hope that helps.

@eugene_stepnov I love differentiation questions, thanks, Eugene! The biggest difference is that Directus is completely free and open-source, while Retool has many limitations and paywalls... even when self-hosting. Another big benefit of being open-source beyond pricing) is that you actually have control over the codebase and since it's built modularly, you can infinitely extend it. This means there is effectively no feature ceiling. The second big one is our Connection Toolkit. Retool offers a rudimentary REST API Generator that you need to manually build from a CSV. Directus, by comparison, dynamically builds your REST and GraphQL APIs and automatically keeps them up-to-date based on any changes to your schema. We do this with an agnostic AST file, so Directus can also provide schema migrations, OpenAPI spec files, and more. Also, while Directus is built for Developers, the Directus App is designed for non-technical users. This is a key difference, because you don't need to know SQL (or any query language) to build/filter data sets. Retool gives a nice abstraction layer... but still relies on SQL, and is therefore out of reach for the broader demographic. Beyond these big ones, there are a multitude of other Enterprise-level features that we support, including: content workflows, multilingual/translation support, far more granular filter-based permissions, webhooks, event hooks, built-in auth (SSO, OIDC, OAuth2, AD, etc), digital asset management, and live image transformations. I won't say there isn't a healthy amount of overlap on the App-Builder side, but Directus definitely supports a broader range of use-cases.

@hugo_sousa2 Thank you! We greatly appreciate your support and insights!

@hugo_sousa2 Thanks, Hugo! I like to think of Directus as those perfect Swiss army knives that have JUST the right number of tools to get things done. Not the enormous bloated ones that don't fit in your pocket, and not the tiny toy ones that are missing crucial tools... that perfect balance. 🧰

@lukas_sachse1 Thank you! We are grateful for such strong support and look forward to many new solutions :)

@lukas_sachse1 That's great to hear!! Having used it for a bit now, are there any features you would like to see added to the platform? We're excited to find some awesome things to work on next. ✨

@benhaynes Just keep on your roadmap. Cant wait to see the coming marketplace. I'm very interested in a visual-pagebuilder-module like i have mentioned on discord some days ago

@lukas_sachse1 Exactly — at this point we're balancing new features and improvements with stability, tests, and docs. The website Marketplace will be great, but the in-app marketplace (with "over the wire" installs) will be a game-changer. As for the Page Builder, now that we have the Many-to-Any relationship built into Core, it will be much easier to build out a WYSIWYG page builder interface on top of it. It would be a pretty opinionated interface though, so it's likely going to be an extension itself. All the more reason for a solid Marketplace! 🛍️

@samdze Thanks! Vue.js definitely is a wonder to work with, plus the myriad of it's benefits extends (😉) to the powerful extensions you can craft to fit any unique business logic or needs you may have!

@samdze That's awesome to hear! And not only Vue.js... but Vue 3! I'm not the best dev (more of a designer) but I find it so easy to work with Vue, I love it. Really fun to create a super powerful Directus Interface in just a couple hours! Now I just need more time for all that fun stuff. 😊

@samdze Thank you! I couldn't agree more! Working with Vue 3 using the Composition API and all the new tooling is such a breeze.

@austin_fish I couldn't have said this better myself, thank you, Austin! ❤️ So happy to count you as one of our long-time users and community members! The Front-End Templating is a really interesting feature to dive into. On one hand, we want to make sure we remain true to our "data" roots, and avoid painting ourselves exclusively as a CMS. And even within the CMS use-case, we aim to be headless, so it's hard to build website templates without thinking about support for other types of digital experiences and touchpoints. That said, powering websites is a HUGE part of what we do, and we should embrace those that want to use a modern solution like Directus. I think the ideal path forward is to include a Module Extension (or even a robust Interface Extension) that allows a WYSIWYG template editor with an alternate code view for power-users. If we can allow this to output JSON in addition to HTML, that's an even bigger win. This becomes a pretty opinionated direction, and we try to stay agnostic... but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't spent some time designing what our Template system would look like. That, combined with some ready-made integrations/webhooks for triggering an SSG Netlify build would be awesome! I think the biggest advantage to this feature would be how we could have a really smart content auto-complete. So when you type "{{" (or whatever) you could get nice context menus for selecting the deeply nested relational data you want to inject or loop over... while still keeping the site dynamic. Really cool stuff! 🤯

Thank you for this detailed and excellent review @austin_fish !! I can confirm that the team spends nearly as much time on design -- @benhaynes @nitwel @rijkvanzanten ... argue over pixel placement almost as often and heatedly as they do about eeking another millisecond of performance out of the APIs .. ;) Members and users like you drive us to constantly improve and we appreciate all your contributions and feedback. Cheers!🍻

@benhaynes I agree that a Module could be effective in providing a frontend templating interface. In fact, over the last few months that's something I've very heavily put my time toward thinking up, with the intention of building. I'm still very much in the conceptualization stage, however, I have many ideas regarding a seamless path forward and I'd love to discuss them with you sometime! 😄

@austin_fish Always down to discuss (and offer some design mocks) over Discord!

@busrentalindubai Haha, of course!! 🎈

@busrentalindubai @rijkvanzanten Nice try with the Markdown 😉

@ian_jamieson Cheeky is great and we love questions. I will answer the last two and ask @rijkvanzanten or @benhaynes to tag up on the first one. - Websockets are not supported yet, but it is one of our current top priority features. Exciting possibilities once we have this implemented. - Single database per project(e.g. directus instance), here again this a much requested feature and one on our planning map.

@ian_jamieson Haha, I had a whole response ready... and then the team swooped in and gave better answers than I could have. 😂 What I can say is that I am pushing very hard to get websockets into the platform ASAP. I have some ideas for very cool features that rely on it, but more importantly, it's a crucial requirement of project's that rely on realtime data. As for multiple databases — we used to support this, but removed it to drastically simplify the core codebase. Are you asking regarding multitenancy?

@benhaynes haha. Yeah, I see a whole lot of answers. A single db with redis might be fine, I was thinking splitting things up. Like an shared auth db, one to handle millions of listings and another for page content. Regarding sockets, I've been experimenting with Hasura with a nextjs front-end and enjoy getting data via a normal query or subscription. It's just setting up the Apollo config with the api url and ws url. I'll give directus a spin tomorrow in docker.

@ian_jamieson Awesome! We just passed 12M Docker pulls a couple days ago... so you'll be in good company! 🐳 You can certainly use different databases for separation of concerns... or just soft partition that data with roles/permissions. We try to stay unopinionated and offer multiple options whenever possible... so you have choices. Also, it's worth noting that we've been looking into multiple-database support (though we're a ways out from that still), mostly as a way to completely isolate our system tables from your content tables. Let us know how your PoC goes... would love to hear your feedback!

Thank you @akrantz01 ! Our community is our backbone and we are grateful to have you as part of it. Let us know what we can do better :)

@akrantz01 That's great to hear!! Transitioning from a pre-release (RC) to General Availability is always tricky... I'm so happy to hear this has been a seamless process for you! Despite not having any issues — are there any awesome features you'd like us to add to our dev wishlist? 🤔

@benhaynes The two biggest features on my wishlist were already added: headers in webhooks and SSO support. Though it is worth noting that we are still running on RC 85 😬, so I'm sure many of the things I've been looking for already exist. We're looking to upgrade for v9 in the next couple of weeks.

@akrantz01 Haha, welp, we're here to help you get on a GA release of Directus whenever works for you! With the popularity of SSG websites, anything that can improve webhooks is a great idea in my book! Any specific SSO options you were looking for?

@benhaynes I was primarily looking for ad-hoc user creation. I ended up writing a hook that to do it for me, but it is super hacky. The other thing was the ability to disable email and password login entirely, or redirect the email through the external IdP.

@entangledmass as far as I know @benhaynes created them using figma.

@entangledmass Hey thanks! Maybe not too common for the CEO to also be the Creative Director, but hey, we're a small open-source team! I used Figma for these images (and for all our other Directus design work) — the ability to work from the browser and share/collaborate on files is absolutely amazing. I used to use Sketch/Illustrator, but Figma has completely stolen my heart... it's amazing. Always a little bummer when the platforms we post images to add all that compression/artifacts, but ProductHunt isn't too bad. Happy to dive into any questions on our broader design system too! 🎨