Directus is always at the top of self-hosted CMS lists, but one of the reasons I avoid it and other PHP self-hosted headless CMS solutions is due to the difficulties(tech debt) of automating dev environments and CI/CD pipelines across different distros and OSes.
I would have possibly given Directus a spin if it didn't have hard dependencies on the following PHP system extensions: curl, gd, finfo, pdo_mysql and mbstring. Not to go too off topic, but I wish PHP extensions could be installed via Composer and Packagist (similar to how NPM handles native modules).
The problem you're describing is precisely why containers are so popular. You can install and deploy any app even if it doesn't provide user-level installation choices (such as php native extensions)
I would have possibly given Directus a spin if it didn't have hard dependencies on the following PHP system extensions: curl, gd, finfo, pdo_mysql and mbstring. Not to go too off topic, but I wish PHP extensions could be installed via Composer and Packagist (similar to how NPM handles native modules).