# Does the Croct integration care if Strapi is self-hosted?

Asked by dvolkov on 2025-06-08. Tags: strapi, self-hosted, setup.

We run self-hosted Strapi on our own infrastructure, and the admin panel sits
behind a VPN, only the content API is publicly reachable through our frontend.

Before I pitch this internally I want to confirm there is no hidden requirement
for Strapi Cloud or for Croct to reach our Strapi admin from outside. Some
integrations assume a hosted CMS with a public URL and that would be a dealbreaker
for us. Does anything in the Croct setup talk to Strapi directly?

## 1 answer

### Accepted answer from jkramer (2025-06-08)

Nothing talks to Strapi directly. The integration is a mapping in your frontend
code: your app fetches content from Strapi like it already does, and the
components or dynamic zones you want to personalize are mapped to Croct slots
where they render. Croct never calls the Strapi API and never needs to know
where Strapi lives, so self-hosted behind a VPN is exactly the same as Strapi
Cloud from its point of view. The SDK runs in your app, not in the CMS.

Setup is `npx croct@latest init` in the frontend project. You can confirm
everything is wired up on the Integration page of the Croct dashboard, which
shows a green status once it has received traffic in the past 24 hours. Your
VPN-only admin is irrelevant to any of it.