👩‍🚀 Astro

A next-generation static-site generator with partial hydration. Use your favorite JS framework and ship bare-minimum JS (or none at all!).

🔧 Setup

# currently hidden during private beta, please don't share :)
npm install astro@shhhhh

🧞 Development

Add a dev npm script to your /package.json file:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "astro dev ."
  }
}

Then run:

npm run dev

⚙️ Configuration

To configure Astro, add a astro.config.mjs file in the root of your project. All of the options can be omitted. Here are the defaults:

export default {
  /** Where to resolve all URLs relative to. Useful if you have a monorepo project. */
  projectRoot: '.',
  /** Path to Astro components, pages, and data */
  astroRoot: './astro',
  /** When running `astro build`, path to final static output */
  dist: './_site',
  /** A folder of static files Astro will copy to the root. Useful for favicons, images, and other files that don‘t need processing. */
  public: './public',
  /** Extension-specific handlings */
  extensions: {
    /** Set this to "preact" or "react" to determine what *.jsx files should load */
    '.jsx': 'react',
  },
};

💧 Partial Hydration

By default, Astro outputs zero client-side JS. If you'd like to include an interactive component in the client output, you may use any of the following techniques.

• <MyComponent /> will render an HTML-only version of MyComponent (default)
• <MyComponent:load /> will render MyComponent on page load
• <MyComponent:idle /> will use requestIdleCallback() to render MyComponent as soon as main thread is free
• <MyComponent:visible /> will use an IntersectionObserver to render MyComponent when the element enters the viewport

💅 Styling

If you‘ve used Svelte’s styles before, Astro works almost the same way. In any .astro file, start writing styles in a <style> tag like so:

<style>
  .scoped {
    font-weight: bold;
  }
</style>

<div class="scoped">I’m a scoped style</div>

👓 Sass

Astro also supports Sass out-of-the-box; no configuration needed:

<style lang="scss">
  @use "../tokens" as *;

  .title {
    color: $color.gray;
  }
</style>

<h1 class="title">Title</h1>

Supports:

• lang="scss": load as the .scss extension
• lang="sass": load as the .sass extension (no brackets; indent-style)

🦊 Autoprefixer

We also automatically add browser prefixes using Autoprefixer. By default, Astro loads the default values, but you may also specify your own by placing a Browserslist file in your project root.

🍃 Tailwind

Astro can be configured to use Tailwind easily! Install the dependencies:

npm install @tailwindcss/jit tailwindcss

And also create a tailwind.config.js in your project root:

module.exports = {
  // your options here
}

Note: a Tailwind config file is currently required to enable Tailwind in Astro, even if you use the default options.

Then write Tailwind in your project just like you‘re used to:

<style>
  @tailwind base;
  @tailwind components;
  @tailwind utilities;
</style>

🍱 Collections (beta)

Astro’s Collections API is useful for grabbing collections of content. Currently only *.md files are supported.

🔽 Markdown

// pages/blog.astro
---
import PostPreview from '../components/PostPreview.astro';

const blogPosts = import.meta.collections('./post/*.md');
---

<main>
  <h1>Blog Posts</h1>
  {blogPosts.map((post) => (
    <PostPreview post={post} />
  )}
</main>

This will load all markdown files located in /pages/post/*.md, compile them into an array, then expose them to the page.

If you were to inspect the array, you‘d find the following schema:

const blogPosts = [
  {
    content: string, // Markdown converted to HTML
    // all other frontmatter data
  },
  // …
];

🧑‍🍳 Advanced usage

All of the following options are supported under the 2nd parameter of import.meta.collections():

const collection = import.meta.collections('./post/*.md', {
  /** If `page` is omitted, all results are returned */
  page: 1, // ⚠️ starts at 1, not 0
  /** How many items should be returned per-page (ignored if `page` is missing; default: 25) */
  perPage: 25,
  /** How items should be sorted (default: no sort) */
  sort(a, b) {
    return new Date(b.date) - new Date(a.date); // sort newest first, by `date` in frontmatter
  }
  /** Should items be filtered by their frontmatter data? */
  filter(post) {
    return post.tag === 'movie'; // (optional) only return posts tagged "movie"
  }
});

🚀 Build & Deployment

Add a build npm script to your /package.json file:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "astro dev .",
    "build": "astro build ."
  }
}

Then run:

npm run build

Now upload the contents of /_site_ to your favorite static site host.