BASH CMS

Governed publishing from your repo, inside VS Code: browse what's worth sharing, draft LinkedIn company-page posts, run the brand guard, approve with your name on it, and publish — with an idempotency ledger so nothing ever double-posts.

Built by BASH Consulting and used to run its own company page. The pipeline follows one rule end to end: drafts are files, approval is a human decision recorded in the file, and a script does the mechanical work. No post leaves your machine without a person deciding it should.

How it works

Content ──▶ Draft (status: pending) ──▶ Approve (status: approved) ──▶ Publish ──▶ Ledger
   │              a file in                a person, in the             POST /rest/posts    .github/
 .cms/ index      drafts/linkedin/         review panel                 as the org          linkedin-log.json
 or a frontmatter scan

• Content comes from the .cms/ contract when your repo has one (the zer0-CMS content engine's machine-readable index), and degrades honestly to a frontmatter scan when it doesn't.
• Drafts are markdown files with type / status / source frontmatter — the same queue format the BASH CI lane publishes from, so the extension and a GitHub Actions workflow can share one queue and one ledger without stepping on each other.
• The guard is mechanical: LinkedIn's 3,000-character limit, the 140-character "…see more" fold, a banned-phrase list, filler detection, and your own patterns file. Errors block a live post; a human can still be overruled only by a human.
• The ledger is keyed by canonical URL. Either lane (extension or CI) posts first; the other skips. Byte-compatible with the Python lane's json.dump output, so the file never churns in git.

The four views

View	What it shows
Drafts	The queue, by status — open the review panel, approve, publish
Content	Distributable pages (health-ranked when .cms/ exists), with a posted badge
What to write next	Catering lanes: A — distribute what exists · B — write more of what landed · C — say the quiet part · D — refresh what worked
Published	The ledger, newest first — jump to the live post

Getting started

1. Install the extension, open your content repo.
2. Set bashCms.linkedin.orgUrn and bashCms.site.baseUrl (Settings → BASH-CMS).
3. Run BASH-CMS: Set LinkedIn Credentials and paste a token with w_organization_social + r_organization_social (from the token generator; requires Community Management API access on your LinkedIn app).
4. Run BASH-CMS: LinkedIn: Who Am I to confirm the token, scopes, and expiry.
5. Draft from the Content view, review, approve — and when you're ready to go live, enable bashCms.publish.allow.

Publishing is off by default. Until you enable it, every path — commands, the review panel, MCP — is preview and draft only.

Commands

Command	What it does
Set / Clear LinkedIn Credentials	Token (and optional client id/secret) into VS Code SecretStorage — never settings, never a file
LinkedIn: Who Am I	Token status, granted scopes, days to expiry
New Article Draft / New Text Draft	Stage a status: pending draft in the queue
Preview LinkedIn Payload	The exact /rest/posts body that would send — no network
Run Brand Guard on Draft	Errors, warnings, and the fold preview
Approve Draft	pending → approved, recorded in the file
Publish Draft… / Publish All Approved Drafts	The live path: guard → ledger → confirm → post → record
Open Review Panel	The approval gate, made legible (below)
Generate Catering Worklist	Write .cms/distribution/worklists/<date>-catering.md
Open Post on LinkedIn	Jump from the ledger to the live post
Configure MCP Server (.vscode/mcp.json)	Fallback wiring for older VS Code

The review panel

One panel per draft, opened beside the editor: the commentary with the fold marker where LinkedIn truncates, every guard finding, the exact outgoing JSON, and the ledger state. The Publish button stays disabled until the gates pass — and the extension re-checks every gate on its own side when you click, because a webview is UI, never the gate.

MCP server

The extension registers a bundled MCP server with VS Code (1.101+), so Copilot agent mode — or any MCP client pointed at dist/mcp-server.js — gets six tools:

Tool	Safe?
linkedin_whoami · linkedin_list_posts · linkedin_get_post · linkedin_preview	read-only
linkedin_draft	writes a pending draft for a human
linkedin_publish	off by default — needs BASH_CMS_MCP_ALLOW_PUBLISH=1 in the server env and confirm: true per call

The access token is injected into the server process only at start time, from SecretStorage — it never appears in a static definition, a setting, or a log.

Settings

Setting	Default	Purpose
bashCms.linkedin.orgUrn	—	The company page (urn:li:organization:…)
bashCms.linkedin.apiVersion	202606	LinkedIn-Version header (YYYYMM)
bashCms.site.baseUrl	—	Canonical site origin
bashCms.site.permalinkPattern	/posts/:year/:month/:day/:slug/	Canonical URL shape (the ledger key)
bashCms.content.globs	pages/_posts/**/*.md	Where content lives when there's no .cms/
bashCms.content.previewsDir / .fallbackImage	assets/images/…	Card thumbnail resolution
bashCms.drafts.folder	drafts/linkedin	The queue
bashCms.ledger.path	.github/linkedin-log.json	The shared ledger
bashCms.publish.allow	false	The master gate
bashCms.publish.acceptStatuses	pending, approved	Set to approved only to require the in-editor approval step
bashCms.guard.bannedPatternsFile	—	Extra banned patterns ([{name, pattern, flags?}])
bashCms.env.readDotEnv	true	Read LINKEDIN_* from the workspace .env as a fallback

Boundaries

Four rules this tool is built around, in order of importance:

1. Every post is approved by whoever's name goes on it. There is no unattended path to the live page.
2. Each account is authorized by its own owner's consent — a token the owner minted, stored in SecretStorage.
3. The audience you write for is declared by you — never derived from connections, followers, or anyone's profile data.
4. Everything read back is your own aggregate numbers. No member-level data enters the catering lanes.

Security notes

• Tokens live in VS Code SecretStorage (the OS keychain). The workspace .env is a read-only fallback for repos that already use one; the extension never writes secrets to disk.
• LinkedIn access tokens last 60 days and programmatic refresh is limited to LinkedIn partners — Who Am I tells you the days remaining, and the ledger records the expiry so a CI health-check can warn too.
• The HTTP client never puts the token in an error message or a log line.

Development

npm install
npm run compile        # type-check + lint + both bundles
npm test               # unit + golden + MCP stdio + integration (downloads VS Code 1.101)
npx @vscode/vsce package   # build the .vsix

The test suite includes golden cross-lane fixtures generated by the Python publishing lane (src/test/fixtures/golden/) — the ledger bytes, payload previews, and catering worklists must match that lane byte-for-byte, because both write the same files in the same repos. Regenerate with python3 src/test/fixtures/golden/generate.py <path-to-bashconsultants>.

License

MIT — © Amr Abdel-Motaleb, BASH Consulting.