Unleashing the Power of Astro

By Tamas Piros

Astro is a modern static site generator that allows developers to build fast, optimized websites—a critical requirement in today’s rapidly evolving ecosystem, where user demands are high. Astro’s story goes back to 2021, when Fred K. Schott released the first version of the framework. At the time of writing this tutorial, Astro is already at version 4 and has seen many amazing features added to it.

Astro has gained popularity over its brief existence, due to:

• its innovative approach to creating websites, which emphasizes performance
• its smooth developer experience
• its ability to blend various other frameworks seamlessly

Astro truly is a force to be reckoned with. In this book, we cover:

• Getting Started with the Basics of Astro, where we'll go over the key concepts, discover what an Astro file looks like, and introduce the demo we'll be using throughout
• Rendering Options in Astro: Building a Layout, which focused on layouts and the various rendering options available at our disposal with Astro.
• Fetching and Using Data with Astro, in which we’ll explore how to retrieve data in Astro.
• Getting Started with Content Collections and View Transitions in Astro, where we'll firstly look at content collections, which empower us to effectively manage our content while also enabling data validation and TypeScript type safety for all the content within an Astro project. We'll also look at View Transitions, available in Astro since version 3.
• Image Optimization and Deploying Our First Astro Site, where we’ll look at the image optimization options offered by Astro, and we’ll learn how to deploy a production-ready site built with Astro.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SitePoint
• Release date: Jan 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781925836608

Tamas Piros

Tamas is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies and a seasoned Developer Evangelist. He is a passionate advocate for modern web technologies, helping people understand and unlock the latest & greatest features of web development.

Book preview

Preface

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for developers who are interested in learning to use Astro to build websites. It assumes familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Some familiarity with other front-end frameworks will be beneficial but is not required.

Conventions Used

Code Samples

Code in this book is displayed using a fixed-width font, like so:

A Perfect Summer's Day

It was a lovely day for a walk in the park.

The birds were singing and the kids were all back at school.

You’ll notice that we’ve used certain layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

Tips, Notes, and Warnings

Hey, You!

Tips provide helpful little pointers.

Ahem, Excuse Me ...

Notes are useful asides that are related—but not critical—to the topic at hand. Think of them as extra tidbits of information.

Make Sure You Always ...

... pay attention to these important points.

Watch Out!

Warnings highlight any gotchas that are likely to trip you up along the way.

Supplementary Materials

https://www.sitepoint.com/community/ are SitePoint’s forums, for help on any tricky problems.

[e-mail] is our email address, should you need to contact us to report a problem, or for any other reason.

Chapter 1: Getting Started with the Basics of Astro

Astro is a modern static site generator that allows developers to build fast, optimized websites—a critical requirement in today’s rapidly evolving ecosystem, where user demands are high. Astro’s story goes back to 2021, when Fred K. Schott released the first version of the framework. At the time of writing this tutorial, Astro is already at version 4 and has seen many amazing features added to it.

Astro has gained popularity over its brief existence, due to:

its innovative approach to creating websites, which emphasizes performance

its smooth developer experience

its ability to blend various other frameworks seamlessly

Due in part to a new monthly sponsorship from Vercel, and because it’s the first framework to implement the View Transitions API, Astro is a force to be reckoned with.

This tutorial is the first in a series that will introduce Astro and walk through some its basics—such as rendering, content collections, data fetching, and image optimization.

Key Concepts of Astro

How can one framework stand out in terms of performance? Let’s start by discussing one of the key concepts of Astro, called Astro Islands (or Component Islands). To better understand this web architecture style, let’s take a step back and discuss purely component-based development. If you’ve worked with React, Vue or Angular before, you likely have created components. Components encapsulate functionality: a React application is just a set of components put together in a logical way. My favorite analogy is that components are like Lego blocks: we use them to build our project.

There’s a striking problem with how components work under the hood in frameworks such as React and Angular. Usually, when a project is created, some components don’t necessarily require JavaScript, as the component isn’t interactive. For example, think about a navigation bar. Built out as a component, it may contain little apart from text, HTML and some styling. However, due to the nature of a framework such as React, we must load all the JavaScript. Otherwise, the component will fail to function.

When speaking