🚀 Astro Theme Cactus 🌵

Astro Theme Cactus is a simple opinionated starter built with the Astro framework. Use it to create an easy-to-use blog or website.

Key Features

• Astro Fast 🚀
• TailwindCSS Utility classes
• Accessible, semantic HTML markup
• Responsive & SEO-friendly
• Dark / Light mode, using Tailwind and CSS variables
• Astro Image Integration for optimised images
• MD & MDX posts
• Satori for creating open graph png images.
• Pagination
• Automatic RSS feed
• Shiki code syntax styling

Demo 💻

Check out the Demo, hosted on Netlify

Quick start

Create a new repo from this template.

Commands

Replace pnpm with your choice of npm / yarn

Command	Action
pnpm install	Installs dependencies
pnpm dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:3000
pnpm build	Build your production site to ./dist/
pnpm preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
pnpm sync	Generate types based on your config in src/content/config.ts

Configure

• Edit the config file src/site.config.ts for basic site meta data
• Update file astro.config.ts site property with your own domain
• Replace & update files within the /public folder:
  • favicon.ico & other social icons
  • robots.txt - update the Sitemap url to your own domain
  • manifest.webmanifest
• Modify file src/styles/global.css with your own light and dark styles
• Create / edit posts for your blog within src/content/post/ with .md/mdx file(s). See below for more details.
• Optional:
  • Fonts: This theme sets the body element to the font family font-mono, located in the global css file src/styles/global.css. You can change fonts by removing the variant font-mono, after which TailwindCSS will default to the font-sans font family stack.
  • OG Image:
    • If you would like to change the style of the generated image the Satori library creates, open up src/pages/og-image/[slug].png.ts to the markup function where you can edit the html/tailwind-classes as necessary. You can also use the playground to aid your design.
    • If you would like to generate svg og images rather than the default .png ones, you will need to remove the @resvg/resvg-js library, and return the svg within the body of the get function from the file src/pages/og-image/[slug].png.ts.

Adding posts

This theme utilises Content Collections to organise Markdown and/or MDX files, as well as type-checking frontmatter with a schema -> src/content/config.ts.

Adding a post is a simple as adding your .md(x) file(s) to the src/content/post folder, the filename of which will be used as the slug/url. The two posts included with this template are there as an example of how to structure your frontmatter. Additionally, the Astro docs has a detailed section on markdown pages.

Frontmatter

Property (* required)	Description
title *	Self explanatory. Used as the text link to the post, the h1 on the posts' page, and the pages title property. Has a max length of 60 chars, set in src/content/config.ts
description *	Similar to above, used as the seo description property. Has a min length of 50 and a max length of 160 chars, set in the post schema.
publishDate *	Again pretty simple. To change the date format/locale, currently en-GB, update/pass the locale arg to function getFormattedDate, found in src/utils/date.ts.
tags	Tags are optional with any created post. Any new tag(s) will be shown in yourdomain.com/posts + yourdomain.com/tags, and generate the page(s) yourdomain.com/tags/[yourTag]
ogImage	This is an optional property. An OG Image will be generated automatically for every post where this property isn't provided. If you would like to create your own for a specific post, include this property and a link to your image, and the theme will skip automatically generating one.

Analytics

You may want to track the number of visitors you receive to your blog/website in order to understand trends and popular posts/pages you've created. There are a number of providers out there one could use, including web hosts such as vercel, netlify, and cloudflare.

This theme/template doesn't include a specific solution due to there being a number of use cases and/or options which some people may or may not use.

You may be asked to included a snippet inside the HEAD tag of your website when setting it up, which can be found in src/layouts/Base.astro. Alternatively, you could add the snippet in src/components/BaseHead.astro.

Another popular provider is google analytics which you could integrate via the above method, or, for example adding astro-google-analytics

pnpm install astro-google-analytics

Edit src/layouts/Base.astro, and add:

---
import { GoogleAnalytics } from 'astro-google-analytics';
// ...other imports
---

<head>
  <!-- Replace id with your own Google Analytics ID -->
  <GoogleAnalytics id="G-XXXXXXXXXX" />
</head>

Deploy

Astro docs has a great section and breakdown of how to deploy your own Astro site on various platforms and their idiosyncrasies.

By default the site will be built (see Commands section above) to a /dist directory.

Acknowledgment

This theme is inspired by Hexo Theme Cactus

License

Licensed under the MIT License, Copyright © 2022