The last couple of years, this blog has been running on the HUGO JAM-stack framework. This has actually been working fine; pick a nice template, and there you go! But being a software engineer and all, I am always on the lookout for the newest kid on the block, and Astro seems to be just that.
What is Astro?
For the people who have not heard of Astro yet. It’s a meta-framework, aimed at content driven websites (think blogs, documentation and marketing pages), competing with Next.js, Nuxt and good old Wordpress. What makes Astro different is that it allows you to use components from any of the big frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte) and just reuse them inside your pages here. That makes it trivial for any developer with experience in these to start working with Astro. In their words:
The web framework for content-driven websites
Astro powers the world’s fastest websites, client-side web apps, dynamic API endpoints, and everything in-between.
What does it has to offer other than that? Its very tailored for content-driven websites, including common structures for fetching data from a local source (markdown files), or from a wide array of supported backend services.
For the purpose of a “smooth migration” I decided to go with a pre-made template called astro-paper which is perfect for a simple personal blog like this! I hope this will motivate me to share my thoughts more often, but time will tell!
As I’m writing this, I’m still using a shared hosting solution to deploy the final Astro build to. However, where Astro shines is the many integrations with Cloud providers, such as Vercel, Netlify and others. Having the freedom to pick either of these providers and still enjoy the benefits of a smooth deployment is really what sets Astro apart from alternative frameworks like Next.js. This has historically been tied closely to Vercel, and althoug its possible to self-host, many features actually implicitly require you to deploy your solution to Vercel.
So yeah, all in all there’s quite some interesting bits to Astro as a framework, but the main challenge imo is if it can prove itself useful beyond the “simple blogs and static marketing pages”.