Modern Emdash Cms

Personal portfolio built with Astro and EmDash CMS, deployed as a Cloudflare Worker. Bilingual Arabic/English, with a built-in MCP server for AI agent access to content.

Stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	Astro SSR
CMS	EmDash (Cloudflare variant)
Runtime	Cloudflare Workers
Database	Cloudflare D1
Media	Cloudflare R2
Sessions	Cloudflare KV
Plugins	Worker Loaders (sandboxed, paid plan)
Email	Cloudflare Email Routing
UI	React + Vanilla CSS

Features

• Bilingual i18n — Arabic (default, RTL) and English (LTR). Default locale served at /, English at /en/...
• EmDash CMS — All content lives in D1, managed via EmDash. Pages fetch at request time via getEmDashCollection() / getEmDashEntry()
• MCP server — /mcp endpoint exposes 46 tools (36 EmDash content tools + 10 custom tools). Auth via ?token= or Authorization: Bearer
• Sandboxed plugins — Marketplace plugins run in isolated Workers via the LOADER binding (paid plan)
• RSS Aggregator — Local native plugin (src/plugins/rss-aggregator/) that imports feeds into EmDash content, with AI summarization/rewriting/translation, image import to R2, custom field mapping, manual curation, and full-text RSS. See docs/plugins/rss-aggregator.md
• Editorial design — Oxblood #6b1438 accent, bone #f8f5ef background, Playfair Display + Amiri + Thmanyah typefaces

Branches

Branch	Plan	Notes
main	Paid	worker_loaders enabled, Cloudflare Email Routing
free-emdash	Free	No worker_loaders in production, Resend email

Local Development

pnpm install

# Create .dev.vars
echo 'EMDASH_TOKEN=your-token' > .dev.vars

# First-time DB setup 
pnpm bootstrap # Not recommended 

# Start dev server
pnpm dev        # http://localhost:4321

Commands

pnpm dev          # Dev server (Miniflare)
pnpm build        # Production build
pnpm run deploy   # Build + deploy to Cloudflare Workers
pnpm typecheck    # Astro type check
pnpm bootstrap    # Init EmDash DB schema + seed

Project Structure

src/
├── components/       # Astro + React components
├── pages/            # File-based routing
│   └── [locale]/     # Locale-prefixed routes
├── i18n/             # ar.json + en.json translation strings
├── layouts/          # Base.astro (root layout, fonts, nav)
├── mcp/              # MCP proxy (index.ts)
├── plugins/          # EmDash plugin entrypoints
├── live.config.ts    # EmDash collection schema
└── worker.ts         # Cloudflare Worker entry + PluginBridge

wrangler.jsonc        # Dev config (includes worker_loaders)
wrangler.prod.jsonc   # Production deploy config

MCP Server

# List available tools
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $EMDASH_TOKEN" https://<Your-Domain>.com/mcp

The /mcp endpoint merges EmDash's built-in content tools with custom tools and forwards requests to the appropriate handler via env.SELF service binding.

Environment Variables

Variable	Required	Description
EMDASH_TOKEN	Yes	Bearer token for MCP auth
EMDASH_URL	No	Override base URL (defaults to https://Your-Domain.com)
JOBS_API_URL	No	External jobs Worker API base URL

Deployment

pnpm run deploy
# Runs: pnpm exec wrangler deploy --config wrangler.prod.jsonc

Cloudflare Workers Builds dashboard deploy commands must include --config wrangler.prod.jsonc — omitting it causes the build to use wrangler.jsonc (which has worker_loaders) and fail with error 10195 on the free plan.