Hood CMS

A fully customisable content management system for ASP.NET Core, built on .NET 10 and EF Core 10.

Clone the demo project

Clone the demo Hood web project from Hood.Demo. Or enter the following command in Git Bash or your command prompt.

$ git clone https://github.com/HoodDigital/Hood.Demo

Create a new project via the dotnet CLI

Coming soon.

NuGet installation

Install Hood CMS via Package Manager.

> Install-Package Hood

or via .NET CLI

> dotnet add package Hood

Client Side Code

The client side code is not required to run Hood CMS as all required JS/CSS are served via jsdelivr. However, if you want to extend or modify the client side code, you can download this npm package, which contains the required distribution CSS and JavaScript, as well as source SCSS and TypeScript files.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/hoodcms

To install Hood CMS client side code via npm.

> npm install hoodcms

or

> pnpm add hoodcms

To use your own client side code, you will also need to update script/link references in your theme's HTML or Razor C# files to use your own version of the code, rather than the CDN.

Build preset

Building your own frontend on Hood's toolchain? Don't clone the configs — extend them. The hoodcms package exports Hood's audited build process:

// rollup.config.mjs
import { hoodRollup } from 'hoodcms/build';
export default hoodRollup({ entries: { site: 'src/ts/site.ts' }, externals: ['owl.carousel'] });

// gulpfile.js
const { registerHoodTasks } = require('hoodcms/build/gulp');
registerHoodTasks(require('gulp'), { less: true });

Your tsconfigs "extends": "hoodcms/tsconfig.base.json" (declare your own rootDir/outDir — path options don't inherit across packages). The toolchain versions are published as optional peer dependencies — install the ones you use at Hood's audited versions.

By default Hood serves its admin/UI assets from jsDelivr; you can serve them from your own wwwroot or a self-hosted CDN instead. See CDN asset delivery.

Database Installation/Update

Hood's schema ships as plain, idempotent, forward-only SQL scripts. EF Core migrations are only an authoring tool; nothing applies them at runtime. Full detail and the regeneration workflow are in sql/README.md.

hood-schema runner (recommended)

hood-schema is a .NET CLI tool that applies the schema with one command — fresh installs and v6→v7 upgrades alike. It journals applied scripts in its own dbo.SchemaVersions table, so it's idempotent and figures out what's needed for you (no per-version chain to run by hand).

dotnet tool install --global Hood.SchemaTool
hood-schema upgrade --connection "Server=…;Database=…;User Id=…;Password=…;TrustServerCertificate=True"

Your own project SQL rides the same path via --scripts <folder> (applied after Hood's core). See sql/README.md for the full runner reference.

By hand (alternative)

Fresh install — create the database, then execute /sql/latest.sql (standard ASP.NET Identity backend).

Upgrade — run the upgrade-delta scripts for each tier above your current version, in folder-then-filename order (the MM.mm.pp/SS key is the apply order):

You're on	Run, in order
6.0.x	/sql/06.01.00/10-update-from-6.0.sql → /sql/07.00.00/202606021946-update-from-6.1.sql → /sql/07.00.00/202606131600-unify-google-apikey.sql → the /sql/07.00.00/9*-view-*.sql scripts
6.1.x	/sql/07.00.00/202606021946-update-from-6.1.sql → /sql/07.00.00/202606131600-unify-google-apikey.sql → the /sql/07.00.00/9*-view-*.sql scripts

The deltas are small and drop no data-bearing columns — see sql/README.md for exactly what each tier changes.

Project layout

Hood is split into focused packages under projects/, each published as its own NuGet package (except the test project):

Package	Purpose
Hood	Complete Hood CMS package — all default controllers, packaged with the Bootstrap 4 default theme.
Hood.Core	DI / runtime engine — base controllers, attributes, contexts, extensions, filters.
Hood.Admin	Admin-area controllers.
Hood.Development	Dev-time helpers.
Hood.SchemaTool	CLI to apply the database schema (idempotent, forward-only) in a deploy pipeline.
Hood.UI.Core	Base UI scaffolding and shared view components.
Hood.UI.Admin	Admin UI — Areas and views.
Hood.UI.Bootstrap3 / Hood.UI.Bootstrap4	Bootstrap 3 / 4 themed UI variants.
Hood.Tests	Test suite (not published).

Full documentation

Documentation is a work in progress. The most useful references today:

• docs/configuration.md — consumer appsettings.json reference: the minimal set to provide, Identity/Auth0 defaults, the site owner, and CDN asset delivery.
• sql/README.md — database schema, the hood-schema runner, upgrade tiers, and how to regenerate the SQL.
• docs/docker.md — the containerised local dev rig (docker compose up).

Also, feel free to add your issues or pull requests to our GitHub — we always welcome contributions!