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Fred K. Schott

Starlight by Astro - Build beautiful documentation websites with ease

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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!

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Fred K. Schott
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!
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!
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!
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.
Musharof Chowdhury
Timely product! Any documentation or guidelines on how to run Starlight sites in subdirectories?
Chris
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...
Chris Chinchilla
I love Astro and build a lot of docs sites… So looks like a near-perfect combination to me, especially in the growing field of what I term "dynamic docs". You can also see an early preview of Starlight on my livestream https://www.youtube.com/live/WqH...
Fred K. Schott
Maker
@chrischinch Thanks Chris!
Joseph Ismailyan
I just migrated my landing page site and blog to Astro and I’m loving it. Might have to move more stuff over now, this looks awesome!
Fred K. Schott
Maker
@joseph_ismailyan That's so awesome to hear, thanks Joseph!
André J
What does the documentation look like?
Elian Van Cutsem
@sentry_co Hey André! You can check out the documentation here: https://starlight.astro.build/ge...
Tyler McGinnis
Starlight looks fantastic. Definitely going to try it out. Congrats team!
Felix Häberle
Congrats on the launch!! I'm curious to know, how does Starlight handle internationalization (i18n)?
Chris
Maker
@felixhaberle Thanks! We provide translations for built-in UI like the search modal in 17 languages currently (always growing), make it easy to provide content in multiple languages and let your users switch between them, and have a fallback content system to support progressively translating your content — provide content first in your default language and users of other languages will see that until you provide a translation.
Dora
Congratulations on the launch!
Colin McDermott
Flawless product. For anyone obsessed with webperf this is the only Docs platform even worth considering. Don't waste your time with other platforms, you will just end up feeling the pain then having to move over to Starlight.
Chris
Maker
Thanks @colinmcdermott! Loved seeing you build sites with Starlight 🌟
Moin Shaikh
Great launch, @fredkschott! What I love the most about Starlight beside it being opensource community is the fact that you guys have put sustainability in the process. I wish more makers consider the sustainability aspect of the product development to make the world a little more greener while making it better. I also have a question whether you are considering adding user analytics or tracking to provide insights on how users interact with the documentation? It could be helpful for product owners to understand which sections are most useful or if there are any pain points in their documentations.
Chris
Maker
Thanks @moingshaikh — glad you share our concern for building environmentally friendly products! While not built in, Starlight is compatible with all major analytics tools. For example, our docs show how to add a Fathom Analytics tracking script to a Starlight site: https://starlight.astro.build/re...
Jacky Pan
I appreciate how user-friendly Starlight seems to be for those creating documentation sites. It having support for Markdown and MDX certainly makes things easier too. Kudos to everyone involved in making this framework happen!
Hashir Ahmed
Kudos on the launch of Starlight! The inclusion of navigation, search, i18n, and more, alongside support for various technologies, is truly impressive. Plus, it being free and open source is fantastic.
Derek
This looks wonderful 🌟 I’ve been wanting to try Astro for a long time, but finally have a need for this one. Keep up the great work 😊
Liran Tal
Congrats, team! Excited to see more and more projects incubated based on Astro.
Maria from MegaVote
Congrats Fred & team on the launch!
Jayden Jameson
Interesting launch! Congratulations, Fred!
Tukur
This will save a whole lot of time for me. I'm definitely going to use this product.
Chris
Maker
@bello_tukur That’s cool to hear! Anything in particular you have in mind?
Garik Bernecyan
I can already tell this will be a game-changer. Kudos on the launch, you've definitely earned my upvote!
Wat
Good!!!