This is the 2nd launch from Astro. View more

Starlight by Astro

Build beautiful documentation websites with ease

Starlight is the web framework for building modern documentation websites. Comes with navigation, search, i18n, syntax highlighting, dark mode, and more included. Supports React, Svelte, Vue, Tailwind CSS, Markdown, and MDX. All free + open source!

Free

Launch tags:

Open Source•Education•Developer Tools

Launch Team

Fred K. Schott

Astro

Maker

📌

Hello PH! 👋 I’m Fred K. Schott, co-creator of Astro and one of the makers behind Starlight. I am so excited to show off what we've been working on. Starlight is a framework for building beautiful, fast, well-structured documentation websites. Over the past 6 months, the entire Astro core team — along with our amazing open-source community — has been hard at work building Starlight. Now, it's finally ready to share. Here are the highlights: 🧩 Starlight includes everything you'll need to launch. There is built-in search (powered by Pagefind), site navigation, i18n, a11y, SEO, clean typography, code highlighting, dark mode, automatic "edit in GitHub" links, and so much more. Focus on your content (Markdown, Markdoc, MDX) and let Starlight take care of the rest. 🏗️ Need to customize? Bring your favorite UI libraries and existing components into your codebase. Starlight is powered by Astro which means we support all of your favorite UI libraries like React, Vue, Svelte, Tailwind CSS, and more. 🧠 Most importantly, Starlight embodies 2+ years of learning and best-practices for what it takes to build great docs at Astro scale. In the last month alone we have merged 450+ Pull Requests into the Astro documentation site from a community of over 600 open source contributors. Starlight is the framework that we wish existed back when we got started! ♻️ But my favorite thing about Starlight is our commitment to reducing our environmental impact. It may sound small, but every website you visit costs energy to deliver to your device. And documentation websites get a LOT of hits. The good news is that Starlight is environmentally friendly, producing just 0.01g of CO₂ per pageview as measured by websitecarbon.com. That's greener than 99% of all websites tested! No other documentation framework matches our lightweight footprint, with some expending as much as 70x the CO₂ per page 🥵 We'd be thrilled to hear your feedback and answer any questions! And, if you have some documentation that you are putting off writing -- or if you already have a docs site that you're not totally satisfied with -- give Starlight a quick try. You'll be happy you did!

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2yr ago

Alessandro Cauduro

@fredkschott great work . we really love astro and actually used astro docs as the base for our new documentation overhaul! What is the relation and how similar are astro docs and astro starlight? is there a migration path? keep up the good work!

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2yr ago

Nate Moore

Great question @alew3! Starlight is definitely the successor to our original docs template, with a whole lot of extra features like theme support and internationalization built-in. Depending on how much you customized the original docs template, migration could be as simple as starting a new Starlight project and moving your Markdown files over. We plan to migrate the official Astro documentation (https://docs.astro.build) to use Starlight as well, but our first priority was to get it out there so other teams could start building!

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2yr ago

Noob Science

Just tried it out, really cool way to set up docs. I love the search functionality. It is not very heavy, but works just perfect.

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2yr ago

Musharof Chowdhury

Lineicons

Timely product! Any documentation or guidelines on how to run Starlight sites in subdirectories?

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2yr ago

Chris

Astro

Maker

@musharofchy Thanks! Would love to know about what you might use Starlight for? We have a guide to adding Starlight to existing Astro sites that covers adding the site in a subdirectory: https://starlight.astro.build/ma... And if you just want to deploy to a subpath, Astro’s base configuration option should have you covered: https://docs.astro.build/en/refe...

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2yr ago

Musharof Chowdhury

Lineicons

@delucis Awesome! thanks for the resources, will give a try!

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2yr ago

Astro Launches

Starlight by Astro Build beautiful documentation websites with ease

Launched on August 29th, 2023

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5/5 based on 34 reviews

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Maker reviews of Astro

Cody Bromley

used this to build Blankie

Blankie

(123 points)

I wanted a way to make Blankie a great website without a lot of upkeep, and Astro delivered. The Vite core underneath it all generates such a clean static site and I'm thrilled that the site is 100% passing on Lighthouse.

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1mo ago