cdnjs is a free, community-maintained content delivery network that hosts thousands of open-source frontend libraries. It delivers popular JavaScript and CSS assets from a global CDN to speed up website performance and reduce server load, with each library version stored as an immutable snapshot under a predictable directory structure.
The platform provides a RESTful JSON API for programmatic access to library metadata, version details, and search functionality. This API returns structured data with HTTP cache headers, including immutable version details cached for nearly a year and library metadata refreshed every six hours. A unified error handling system returns structured JSON objects with appropriate status codes.
Library submissions are managed through a Git repository with an automated pipeline that validates, minifies, and deploys assets via pull requests. Assets are stored directly on disk without a database, and distributed across multiple CDN providers for global availability and redundancy. The platform also provides access to basic CDN usage statistics and validates permitted file extensions for upload and delivery.