Building a site with AstroJS: a web developer’s experience

This article aims to be a living post that gets revised as I construct this site that catalogs my experience building it

Starting up

Starting a project by following the Astro Documentation is really straightforward. I appreciated how the authors delved into the technical motivations and paradigms underpinning astro.

It’s easy enough to begin. You just start with a command that scaffolds out a project for you. The experience feels fast and fluid. Like you can just go if you already know what you’re doing.

I appreciated that there isn’t a ton of boilerplate here. If you start with an empty project, Astro as a framework is as unopinionated as they come.

Deployment

So building this was quick. I couldn’t let myself linger too long. I wanted something up and running quickly. Astro was great for this. I deployed to cloudflare pages using wrangler via their guide. This was all great for a beginner. I’ve worked with node and am comfortable with the command line. But I’ve never worked with a framework that could be as stripped down, but also as powerful as Astro. It’s a great experience so far. I’m excited to see where the this goes as I keep adding features and complexity.

Hanling Content

I’m only just getting started adding content to this new astro site. But it’s a breeze. Sorting “posts” by metadata was a simple one line change. The ability to craft these bespoke templates from arbitrary data is extremely powerful.