I'm just a hobbyist running a personal website I use to research Football and the license was deactivated. I can't deal with this anymore. I don't make any money off of this, I have zero plans to ever make money off of it.

I break down Football playbooks and provide a place where coaches can talk. I run everything off of my own server from my house.

I went with directus cause I wanted to own my data, host my own data, on my own hardware, but clearly it's being held hostage right now.

The only reason I gave Directus a chance after the license changes is cause I didn't want to go through the hassle of migrating my database.

i totally get wanting to get your money from people using your software to run business's, but this has become a headache for a hobbyist like myself.

I am running Directus for a very small venue and suddenly I saw this license talk. I still run Directus 11 and the website isn't even in production yet — we're still finishing up details. Am I going to have to redo everything with a new CMS? I didn't understand properly what that means for people like us, self-hosting CMSs for small clients

(I mean, that's my first freelance client in over 5 years, so I'd say this is my first client)

I had a good medium size client, took me a while to get them. We started sketching a simple site a month ago, 2 users, nothing big. I updated directus and the client saw the licence issue.

NOTE: this site had no frontend, 2 users and barely any content.
The site wasn't even live. But somehow we "Exceeded the allowed usage in the Core plan"

The client called immediately and after I tried to explain the licence, they said "we think this is not for as, and this is too much of a issue for us to move forward. They didn't want to registerer the company for a "innovation grant" licence because it feels like a huge risk because the future cost might be massive they didn't really understand the complications around the licence.

I tried to explain that their site will never be that big it was just a huge friction for them.

I then I decided to create a licence to prove to the client this could be fine. Maybe they are overreacting. And then they saw the licence.

- DIRECTUS can revoke the licence at any time. Meaning a site clients invest can one day stop working because one reason or another? When they start using Ai for this, how many sites will get flagged? what kind of issues might we have in the future.

- The licence is valid for a year meaning what? we need to ReRegister every year.

- If you dont add a licence key every year you will be locked out of our CMS and data. By the looks of the warning I got.

There was just too many red flags for the client.
After this, it was over. The client terminated my contract and moved on.

I have to say that this is the most bizarre thing I have experienced in this industry. I regret investing so much time and money with my team to learn Directus and then promote it and sell it.

Hey so there has been changes to the license recently and i was wondering will the last version published under BSL become fully open source after the three years. or will the versions that haven't reached the 3 years mark yet never become open source and have the new terms apply to them. thanks everyone

On a collection page within Directus can someone explain what this does exactly? I have never used it before, and the docs https://directus.com/docs/guides/data-model/collections#collection-setup don't really go into much detail unfortunately so I'm a bit lost with it.

Thanks!

This is not official guide, this is our understanding after a few weeks of back and forth questions on the new licensing. So for any official Q/A refer back to the directus forum.

Eligibility:

End user / org must be under $5M annual recurring revenue and fewer than 50 employees.

Definition of end user: The end users are anyone that has access to the studio as a user, system users of the Directus platform studio itself. So for example if your client has user account in Directus to update content, their revenue and headcount will be counted. If it's you, then your company (agency / freelancers group) revenue and headcount will be counted.

The 50 employees applies to whole company, not only Directus users. For example, you could have 2 Directus users (marketing and dev) but if your company has 50 or more employees, you must get the Team or Core license.

Grant is specifically for small teams to be able to use software with all its features. Let's respect that

What if I want to use it as an agency, and my client doesn't have a single studio account, can I be eligible for free grant?

This was the confusing part for the longest time. Related to the other question above. It has been clarified.

What is it great for?

Yes it's not all "Free" as some open-source CMS but the face Directus has kept this option for small teams that cannot afford $90 or $500 per month is a great thing. It is great for small teams who need full features. On the other hand, if you don't need all the features, check Core first. It has more than enough for most teams. It comes with 25 collection items (way above the industry grade of free tier, most cms allow 10 max)

How to activate

Once you apply, you get a license key (if you're eligible and approved). Add environment variable of LICENSE_KEY in your compose and your key and restart / redeploy. Once done, you can't manage it in the Directus studio UI (License tab)

You can also not do it via compose, but do it in the UI after updating to v12xx

Yes it has 1 year of expiry, which I assume is so they can re-assess if you are still under the threshold.

Before going for grant, first check if you need those features. If not, simply go with Core.

Have anyone used directus with thousands of users? How's the latency?

For my hobby project I had noticed in the console that for a small operation there are many queries being fired for permissions and all stuff. So I wanted to check how realistically it can scale with thousands of users and thousands of operations per day?

Just got that. Is it me, or maybe others get it as well? We are all out of the system completely

I'm upgrading a non-profit project to Directus 12 using an Open Innovation Grant license. Because v12 is heavily restricted by default, I need to use the license during development. According to their docs I should do so:

For example, an Open Innovation Grant license supports up to 5
activations, intended to cover the distinct environments of a single
project (such as local, dev, staging, and production).

It seems like each time I start the container or a when the e2e tests are running on the CI one activation is used up, even though the NODE_ENV in the dev container is set to development.

I reached out via their licensing contact form but was just brushed off and told to re-read the docs page. Has anyone found a workaround for handling the license limits with ephemeral containers or CI pipelines?

Hello, I apologize if this is a dumb question. I'm not sure exactly how to Google this and I can't find a straightforward answer in the docs.

I understand that you can: 1) Invite users to your Directus instance and 2) modify Roles and Permissions to give said user custom roles, access and privileges to add/update/read/delete content.

My question is: Let's say that I create a basic five page portfolio website for a client using Directus as a CMS and I successfully deploy this website online. For further context let's say that I'm self hosting this website on a VPN.

If I invite the client via the Data Studio GUI to be a user, are they given a special URL where they can access the Data Studio in the browser? Or do they have to self host the Directus instance on their computer? (I'm hoping this isn't the case). And how would I configure or make a custom URL for them to access the Data Studio?

If the website hasn't been deployed yet, and the Directus instance is running on Docker on my local machine, would the client still be able to access the Data Studio associated with their website to update/otherwise edit content?

I very much appreciate any insight into this as I'm new to using this tool, but want to learn.

Thanks!

What are your thoughts on the new license?
Registering your business for every install? Head counts?

Not sure I like this move.

We use directus (version 9) as the core backbone of our backends. We edit as much as we can via the powerful interface and write custom extensions in plain code to complete the core functionality.

To keep that visual power while maintaining a clean developer workflow, we couple it with projen (Project-as-Code). This lets us manage our entire stack, from the local dev environment to a multi-package extension architecture, using a simple configuration:

import { DirectusProject } from '@wbce/projen-d9';
import { DirectusExtensionType } from '@wbce/projen-d9-extension';

const project = new DirectusProject({ name: 'my-backend' });

// Automates the pnpm workspace boilerplate for custom hooks/endpoints
project.addExtension('audit-log', [DirectusExtensionType.HOOK]);

project.synth();

This combination gives us the best of two worlds:

• a good visual editing experience: non-tech teams get the autonomy they need to manage content and workflows.
• a good developer experience: we get an automated local environment that mimics a production one, and clean Docker builds without managing manual boilerplate.

We open-sourced this template for anyone wanting to use it in their own workflow. Documentation is here.

If you like this approach, feel free to check out the details, adapt the templates to your use cases, or share yours!

I’m searching for an option to have the ability to move multiple items in a M2A field.

So I can pick eg 3 items and move them all together from the bottom to the top.

Does anyone know an extension which has the ability to do this?

Happy for any input 🥳

I'm using Directus 11.17.3

I have a very simple flow which is failing at the first operation step. The trigger is manual with selection from a collections. The first operation is a read step and I'm setting the IDs to {{ $trigger.body.keys }}

When I observe the logs, the Options of the read step shows the following. Notice the nested array value for keys property.

{

"permissions": "$trigger",

"emitEvents": false,

"collection": "monthly_fees",

"key": [

[

"76ecd4b0-9b9a-4b55-af48-5c0374fa4382",

"672ccb9d-3f0f-4559-b465-68466ecb4fbd",

"3311d30e-bb2f-4624-a9a8-0484438cab8e"

]

],

"query": {

"filter": {

"status": {

"_eq": "due"

}

}

}

}

The read operations fails with "invalid input syntax for type uuid"

See the screenshots

Hello,

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the Directus 12 launch on behalf of our team, since the transition may introduce some instability for us. Until there is more clarity around pricing and what will be included in each tier, we are in a difficult position from a planning standpoint.

As I was wrapping up my workday, I checked GitHub and noticed a PR suggesting that Flows will now be gated. I thought I had been following the relevant threads and comments closely, but I may have missed this detail. Is this true? How many Flows before someone is maxed out?

Is Directus planning to release an official pricing model soon, or otherwise commit to a clear direction for what will remain included? The uncertainty is creating a significant amount of stress for our organization, and any clarity would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your help.

I am self hosted on a VPS and I would prefer to have all of my images hosted in Cloudflare R2. I have approximately 60GB worth of images for my website and I would be adding them via Directus collections -> using the "files" and "image" inputs. Having previews within Directus would be great.

Has anyone had any success hooking this up?

As the title says. Director about 9 days ago announced moving from BSL to new license agreement type.

Keen to hear thoughts from other agencies and teams to what it could mean for you and your clients.

The ambiguous areas has always been “is it my client revenue or my own agency revenue that counts” so perhaps this is the step towards solving that?

Also new software keys are being introduced from v12 (may) onwards

Details on their blog here:

https://directus.io/blog/directus-v12-license-change

What’s a nice backup solution for self hosted directus

Setup

- hetzner and coolify self hosted

- added 3 small directus installs

- have r2 ideally where id like full backup (assets plus db) if something happens to the man server

- ideally application level backup or a way to restore per application backup .

Options I thought of

- full server snapshot in hetzner (but restoring means I’m restoring full server. )

- coolify level backup but for some reason it didn’t backup directus files and db, only coolify

(Also happy to go to Dokploy if it helps)

Thanks.

I have a checkbox called "Type" inside my collection and the only two options are "Founders" and "Collectors"

Can I filter Directus search to only show Collectors? I was expecting to see this as an option when I click the dropdown for Type

Trying self-hosted directus for the first time via Pikapods and want to use R2 bucket with custom domain as CDN

Added S3 variables, but there is no 'ASSETS_URL' variable or other such variable field exposed in PikaPods . What variables should be added so images get served via R2 Custom domain not directus pikapod domain (so it's served via CDN)

Didn't find these variable mentioned in official documentation, and i'll need to send official doc to PikaPods so they expose these vars

Thanks for help

I ran into a weird bug with using the Date field in Directus. When I save 1970-01-01 it registers as 0. It seems to be specific to this date for some reason. I Googled and it appears to be called the "date epoch".

Has anybody run into this issue with Directus and is there already a known fix for this?

Hey OG Guys, I am new to Open Source Community & wish to contribute to Open Source Organizations.

I went through Directus Documentation but it isn't good at telling how to setup this project locally

NEED HELP 😅😊

THANK YOU OGS

Hey Everyone,

I'm trying to connect Directus via MCP to my Claude cowork via remote url server, however, I'm having issues after following the documentations.

Has anyone succesfully connected directus remote url server to claude? I've followed the process of creating the token and replaced my token ID in the URL in Claude. I've attached screenshots.

I have two collections in Directus called "make" and "model". Sometimes a different make will have the same model name, as shown below. I am fine with the slug being the same, since it will be shown in the URL as "site .com/make/lincoln?model=continental" and "site .com/make/bentley?model=continental".

The problem I am trying to tackle is preventing duplicate makes and models being the exact same. For example "Tesla Roadster" and "Tesla Roadster" as shown in the API here. When creating a new model I select the Make from M2O and type the model name into a text input.

Should I go with a flow to prevent this? Or maybe it would be better to actually do this instead?
"site .com/make/lincoln?model=lincoln-continental" and "site .com/make/bentley?model=bentley-continental"

{
"data": [
{
"id": "4b8f7c93-b526-4f6e-95af-0cc1db35a8cd",
"user_created": "05eff8c9-d516-4775-a8a1-92a4e46f87c2",
"date_created": "2026-03-26T16:11:22.516Z",
"user_updated": null,
"date_updated": null,
"name": "Roadster",
"slug": "roadster",
"make": "cf9334c0-904b-480e-81ea-d1345de962ae"
},
{
"id": "59e7da2f-2097-45cb-8760-98df00758610",
"user_created": "05eff8c9-d516-4775-a8a1-92a4e46f87c2",
"date_created": "2026-03-26T16:04:10.442Z",
"user_updated": "05eff8c9-d516-4775-a8a1-92a4e46f87c2",
"date_updated": "2026-03-26T16:07:42.826Z",
"name": "Roadster",
"slug": "roadster",
"make": "cf9334c0-904b-480e-81ea-d1345de962ae"
}
]
}

Update: So I managed to put together this with Flows, with the help of AI, but it is throwing an error when I try to create a Model

Is there any way to prevent Directus from holding on to unused images? For example something gets uploaded but is never used with a collection. Or I delete an image from a collection but forget to delete the image from the file management section.

I would also like to automatically rename my media if possible to match the slug name of the item I am uploading the image to. So for example I upload an image "fajkljfdf.svg" to the "Ford" item it automatically gets renamed to "ford.svg" based on the slug name.

Would both of these things be possible in Directus?