hello-astro

Hello Astro is a full featured Astro multi-purpose starter theme written in Typescript and TailwindCSS. It supports Markdown and MDX based pages and blog posts.

Hello Astro can used for any/all of the following:

• corporate/marketing site
• blog
• documentation site
• portfolio site supporting photo galleries

Uses the following integrations:

• @astrojs/mdx
• @astrojs/markdoc
• @astrojs/sitemap
• @astrojs/rss
• @astrojs/tailwind
• @astrojs/alpinejs
• astro-icon
• astro-seo
• astro-robots-txt

In addition, SVG and PNG illustrations sourced from Undraw

This project initially started as a bare bones port of hello-gatsby-starter, but now contains more features (light/dark modes, category pages, search, diagrams, math and more!)

Features

• Full-featured blog with frontmatter (title, description, author, date, image, tags)
• High performance low overhead with minimal Javascript (AlpineJS)
• Full text client based search of blog pages via lunrjs (search index only loaded on first invocation of search on a page)
• Index page and individual pages for authors, categories and tags, including pagination
• Support for RSS feed, sitemap and robots.txt
• SVG design (unDraw, Hero Patterns, Iconify)
• Support for code syntax highlighting
• Full SEO support including Open Graph, Twitter Cards and Schema.org via JSON-LD
• Full support for Light and dark UI modes, as well as following system preferences, in accordance to TailwindCSS recommendation
• Customised 404 error page
• Display math equations using KaTeX via remark-math/rehype-katex (enclosed in $...$ or $$...$$)
• Display Mermaid, Markmap, PlantUML diagrams (authored as a code block with language mermaid, markmap and plantuml)
• Display map at geo coordinates and zoom level using Map component (need to also include extra: ['map'] is frontmatter to load CSS/JS assets for page)
• Calculates and show reading time for blog posts
• CSS/JS assets of external libraries loaded only when needed on a per page and per package basis - no unnecessary bloat
• Photo gallery and lightbox using PhotoSwipe (including display of EXIF tags)
• Carousel component using Swiper
• Documentation pages (modelled after astro docs starter but using Tailwind)

External Packages

The start uses the following external packages:

• Astro
• TypeScript
• TailwindCSS and TailwindUI
• Iconify
• Hero Patterns
• unDraw for illustrations
• MDX and Markdown
• Schema.org and JSON for Linking Data, type-checked using schema-dts
• Open Graph used by Facebook
• Twitter Cards
• AlpineJS
• Local full text search using Lunr
• Math equations using KaTeX via remark-math and rehype-katex
• Diagrams using Mermaid, Markmap and PlantUML
• Open Street Map using Leaflet
• reading-time
• PhotoSwipe
• exifr
• Swiper
• Remark Emoji

It follows the JAMstack architecture by automatically building a static version from the Git repository. The demo is deployed on Github Pages.

🚀 Project Structure

Inside this starter, you'll see the following folders and files:

/
├── public/
│   └── favicon.ico
├── src/
│   ├── assets/
│   │   ├── image.png
│   │   └── gallery/
│   │       └── gallery-name/
│   │           └── image.jpg
│   ├── components/
│   │   └── header.astro
│   ├── content/
│   │   ├── blog/
│   │   |   └── 2022-08-01-post.md
│   │   ├── doc/
│   │   |   └── documentation-page.md
|   │   └── config.ts
│   ├── layouts/
│   │   ├── base.astro
│   │   ├── blog.astro
│   │   └── doc.astro
│   ├── pages/
│   │   ├── index.astro
│   │   └── contact.astro
│   └── config.ts
└── package.json

Astro looks for .astro, .md or .mdx files in the src/pages/ directory. Each page is exposed as a route based on its file name.

src/components/ is where we put any Astro components and similarly src/layouts/ for layouts.

Images can be placed in src/assets/.

Blog and documentation content are created as collections of Markdown or MDX files in src/content.

Any static assets, eg. images, can be placed in the public/ directory.

🧞 Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project, from a terminal:

Command	Action
pnpm install	Installs dependencies
pnpm dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:3000
pnpm build	Build your production site to ./dist/
pnpm preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
pnpm lint	Pretty print the source code
pnpm check	Check the source code for errors
pnpm astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro preview
pnpm astro --help	Get help using the Astro CLI

Release History

• 1.0.0: Initial Release
• 1.0.1: Moved social images to src, improved coverImage processing
• 1.0.2: Upgrade packages to latest
• 1.1.0: Update to astro v2.x, now works with node 18 and 19
• 2.0.0: New version supporting Astro collections! Also clarified that this is a multipurpose theme. Search can now include both Markdown and MDX pages!
• 2.0.1: Updated screenshots, and improved landing page.
• 2.1.0: updated to latest packages, fixed dev links, backported features from personal blog, including Next/Prev links, photo gallery support in Markdown, and improved pagination control.
• 2.2.0: Fixed lint errors, reimplemented map, lightbox and carousel to use leaflet, photoswipe and swiper packages instead of relying on external CDN.
• 2.2.1: Update to astro 2.0.10, fixed asset loading issue with base
• 2.3.0: Removed layout from blog and doc content
• 2.4.0:@astrojs/images now support svg so no need for special handling
• 2.4.1: Use rendered frontmatter for blog and doc posts, fixes issue with diagrams not rendering.
• 2.4.2: Updated packages
• 3.0.0: Major update:
  • Use new Astro optimised asset support
  • new Astro logo
  • optimised post draft filtering
  • cleaned up gallery
  • fixed up SEO errors
  • cleaned up lint errors
  • migrated authors and categories to collections and use referential integrity based on Astro 2.5.0
  • converted social links to a data collection (requires Astro >2.5.0)
  • updated favicon and header metadata
  • improve search to include documentation
• 3.1.0: Enhancement update:
  • Migrated package manager from yarn to pnpm
  • Reference base for head links
  • Added eslint and prettier with plugins
  • Fixed image attributes error in seo component
  • Updated tsconfig to match astro strict
  • Update Katex CSS link
  • Fixed author not appearing in blog card
  • Added Markdoc support
• 3.1.1: Minor update:
  • Lazy load images
  • Support Github emoji via remark-emoji
• 3.1.2: Minor fixes:
  • Check for null categories
  • Slightly improved contact page
  • Improved next/prev processing
  • Updated packages
  • Reduce size of search button to accommodate min width
  • Changed image option for pages from object-contain to object-cover