Nov 29, 2022

Run Netlify CMS and your dev server in one command

If you’re using Netlify CMS, there is a command that you can run to load it in development:

npx netlify-cms-proxy-server

This is useful, but it needs to be run in a separate terminal window to your development server. I use VS Code, which has easy split terminal windows, but it’s still a little annoying to have to fire up two processes when you want to get to work.

# Window 1
npm run dev

# Window 2
npx netlify-cms-proxy-server

An ideal solution would be to run a single command that runs both scripts in parallel, so that you can focus on working as opposed to setting things up.

Thankfully for us, npm-run-all is the perfect solution for this. First we install it as a dev dependency:

npm i -D npm-run-all

Then add a new script to our package.json:

{
    "scripts": {
        "cms": "npx netlify-cms-proxy-server",
        "dev": "astro dev",
        "dev:cms": "npm-run-all --parallel cms dev"
    }
}

Now when you want to run Netlify CMS alongside your development server, you just need to a single command:

npm run dev:cms

Happy coding!

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