README: What's included in this Engineering Blog template?

Apr 24, 2023

Astro Starter Kit: Engineering Blog

This template was built to easily create an engineering blog for one or multiple authors.

Demo: https://astro-engineering-blog.netlify.app/

Getting started

npm create astro@latest -- --template eddyvinck/astro-engineering-blog

Configuration

Edit the values in src/consts.ts to match your brand or company:

export const BRAND = "Acme";
export const SITE_TITLE = "Acme Engineering";
export const SITE_URL = "https://astro-engineering-blog.netlify.app";
export const SITE_DESCRIPTION = "Welcome to the Acme Engineering blog!";
export const PAGINATION_POSTS_PER_PAGE = 5;

Change any lines or add more in the <head> tags in src/components/BaseHead.astro, like the favicon:

<link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/favicon.svg" />

You can also update the colors in tailwind.config.css:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: ["./src/**/*.{astro,html,js,jsx,md,mdx,svelte,ts,tsx,vue}"],
  theme: {
    extend: {
      colors: {
        header: "#000",
        "header-foreground": "#fff",
        "header-dropdown": "#1e293b",
        "header-dropdown-foreground": "#fff",
        link: "#2563EB",
        "link-dark": "#3e7afe",
        primary: {
          500: "#2563EB",
          600: "#1D4ED8",
        },
        "primary-foreground": "#fff",
      },

Optional: enable backend services

You can enable backend services to your project by adding an Appwrite API key:

# in /.env
SECRET_APPWRITE_API_KEY=YOUR_APPWRITE_API_KEY
PUBLIC_APPWRITE_ENDPOINT=https://cloud.appwrite.io/v1
PUBLIC_APPWRITE_PROJECT_ID=PUBLIC_APPWRITE_PROJECT_ID
PUBLIC_APPWRITE_DATABASE_ID=PUBLIC_APPWRITE_DATABASE_ID
PUBLIC_APPWRITE_EMOJI_REACTIONS_COLLECTION_ID=post-reactions

Features

✅ Easy configuration
✅ Minimal styling (make it your own!)
✅ 100/100 Lighthouse performance
✅ SEO-friendly with canonical URLs and OpenGraph data
✅ Uses astro:assets for optimized images
✅ Sitemap support
✅ RSS Feed support
✅ Markdown & MDX support
✅ Search functionality
✅ Author system
✅ Multiple authors per post (co-authoring)
✅ Topics
✅ Blog pagination
✅ Blog drafts
✅ Dark mode (system preference + toggle button)
✅ Backend services (optional, uses Appwrite’s free tier)

Technologies used

Astro as the framework tying everything together
Solid.js for search (all .tsx files) and any other features that require JavaScript
Tailwind CSS for styling
Fuse.js for search logic
Everything is written in TypeScript 💙

Thank you ❤️

Astro team & all the other library authors
The maintainers of the Astro blog template which was used as a base for this template
FrontValue, for letting me work on this template during work hours

🚀 Project Structure

Inside of your Astro project, you’ll see the following folders and files:

├── public/
├── src/
│   ├── components/
│   ├── content/
│   ├── layouts/
│   └── pages/
├── astro.config.mjs
├── README.md
├── package.json
└── tsconfig.json

Astro looks for .astro or .md files in the src/pages/ directory. Each page is exposed as a route based on its file name.

There’s nothing special about src/components/, but that’s where we like to put any Astro/React/Vue/Svelte/Preact components.

The src/content/ directory contains “collections” of related Markdown and MDX documents. Use getCollection() to retrieve posts from src/content/blog/, and type-check your frontmatter using an optional schema. See Astro’s Content Collections docs to learn more.

Any static assets, like images, can be placed in the public/ directory.

CLI Commands

All commands are run from the root of the project, from a terminal:

Command	Action
`npm install`	Installs dependencies
`npm run dev`	Starts local dev server at `localhost:3000`
`npm run build`	Build your production site to `./dist/`
`npm run preview`	Preview your build locally, before deploying
`npm run astro ...`	Run CLI commands like `astro add`, `astro check`
`npm run astro --help`	Get help using the Astro CLI

Learn more about Astro

Check out the documentation or jump into the Discord server.