Today we are proud to share that our amazing engineering team have made all the necessary updates to the WebContainers platform – and the StackBlitz editor itself – needed to support Astro! 🚀 You can try it now!

Astro now supported in StackBlitz WebContainers

Why are we hyped about Astro? Permalink

This minimalistic bundler provides a pretty unique approach to building websites. It's focused on static HTML, striping all the JavaScript from your final build by default – and hence the fastest site loading experience possible! Great for your users, and SEO ❤️ (it will in fact even generate a sitemap and RSS feeds out of the box for you!)

But what if you do need some interactive features on your page? Instead of sending down all of the JavaScript that went into generated each page, Astro will only deliver and hydrate the components that actually are dynamic.

This approach is called Partial Hydration, and you can use it to design your website as a series of lightweight pages (with interactivity sprinkled in where needed) instead of a heavier JavaScript application.

For these interactive parts you can use React, Preact, Vue, Svelte, Web Components (in fact, you can use multiple at the same time!) – in JavaScript or TypeScript. And you can style it with Scoped CSS, CSS Modules, Sass, and others too!

And that's not even all, so if you're excited to learn more, visit the Astro Documentation.

The fact that StackBlitz runs Node.js entirely in your browser is mind-blowing.

Our users can now spin up any Astro starter project or example with StackBlitz in seconds!

Fred K. Schott

creator of Astro

How can you start? Permalink

So what has changed on StackBlitz? Permalink

In order to support Astro, we needed to make several updates to WebContainers, including:

We've also honed the editor to handle .astro files by adding the textmate grammar support and a dedicated file icon.


We also want to give a huge shout out and thank you to the Astro team for all their help in making this happen!

If you’re an OSS maintainer and want to enable WebContainer support for your framework, my DMs are open!

Tomek Sułkowski

Founding Engineer & DevRel at StackBlitz. Let's talk about docs, live examples, teaching, and experimenting in browsers!

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