About Wix-Managed Headless

Wix-managed headless provides a fully managed solution for developing and hosting your headless project. Unlike self-managed headless, you don't need to configure authentication or manage hosting infrastructure.

Benefits

The benefits of Wix-managed headless include:

• Hosting: Wix handles all builds and deployments, including a global CDN and SSL.
• Automatic scaling: The infrastructure automatically scales to meet traffic demands.
• Simplified setup: Includes automatic OAuth setup and pre-configured environment variables.
• Framework versatility: Built on the Astro framework, allowing you to use components from React, Vue, Svelte, or Solid.
• AI-powered bootstrapping: Ability to use Wix Vibe to generate a full UI and project structure from conversational prompts.

Authentication

One of the biggest advantages of Wix-managed headless is automatic authentication:

• Visitors: The CLI automatically generates and manages visitor tokens in the background. This means anonymous visitors can add items to carts, make bookings, and interact with your site without you writing any authentication code. Session data persists across page visits automatically.
• Members: The CLI provides built-in /api/auth/login and /api/auth/logout endpoints that handle the entire login flow. Just link to these endpoints and the CLI takes care of redirecting to the Wix login page, exchanging tokens, and managing the authenticated session. Learn how to implement member login.
• Admin operations: For server-side tasks like managing products or processing orders, you can use API keys. This method of authentication works the same as in self-managed headless.

You can call Wix JavaScript SDK methods directly without setting up OAuth, creating a Wix client, or managing tokens yourself.

Get started

You can create Wix-managed headless projects using different approaches, depending on your preferred workflow.

Wix Vibe

Wix Vibe is an AI-powered tool that lets you bootstrap your entire headless project using conversational prompts. Describe what you want to build, and Vibe generates a full UI and project structure as a starting point. You can continue development entirely in the Vibe editor or open the project locally in your IDE and use the Wix CLI for ongoing development.

Wix CLI

Use the Wix CLI to create, develop, and deploy headless projects. The CLI scaffolds your project from starter templates with automatic authentication setup and hosting configuration. You can develop entirely in your preferred IDE using standard coding practices.

Quick Start a Wix CLI Headless Project

Wix CLI with Vibe

You can combine the Wix CLI and Vibe in your development workflow, giving you the flexibility to switch between coding in your IDE and using AI-powered visual editing. This approach lets you leverage the control of CLI-based development alongside the ease of Vibe's conversational editing. Your local code remains the source of truth.

Projects started in Vibe (as described above) can always be opened locally and developed with the Wix CLI, regardless of template choice.

If you start with the CLI, you can connect your project to Vibe for AI-powered visual editing, but only if you created your project using one of the Vibe-compatible templates. Use the wix connect command to establish this connection. Projects created with standard templates cannot be connected to Vibe.

See also

• About Wix Vibe
• About the Wix CLI