Astro Toolbox Template

This is an Astro project bootstrapped from the Astro CLI. It is a reference on how to integrate commonly used features within Netlify for Astro.

Click this button and it will help you create a new repo, create a new Netlify project, and deploy!

Here's a video for more info: https://youtu.be/GrSLYq6ZTes & a blog post too: https://ntl.fyi/3IrbbN7.

Table of Contents:

• Getting Started
  • Running locally with the Netlify CLI
• Deploy to Netlify
  • Deploying using the Netlify CLI
• Forms
  • Adding a Custom Submission Page
  • Blocking Bot Spam with a Honeypot Field
  • Forms Resources
• Netlify Functions
  • Netlify Functions Resources
• Redirects
  • Redirect Resources
• Astro + Netlify Resources
• Project Structure
• Commands
• Testing
  • Included Default Testing
  • Removing Renovate
  • Removing Cypress

Getting Started

If you want to get started locally, you can clone the project, install the dependencies and run the dev command!

git clone https://github.com/netlify-templates/astro-toolbox/
cd astro-toolbox
npm install
npm run dev

You can then open up http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result! Open up pages/index.astro and modify the code to see the changes auto update as you save.

🧠 Just a heads up, you will not be able to see the function data or redirect output until you run locally with netlify dev (info below in Netlify CLI section)

Running locally with the Netlify CLI

When using this template, you might want to see Netlify features such as redirects, functions, or preview the deploy locally first. To do, this you can install and use the Netlify CLI!

npm install -g netlify-cli # to install the Netlify CLI tool globally
netlify dev

And now your project should be running on http://localhost:8888.

Deploy to Netlify

Deploying using the Netlify CLI

1. Cloning + Install Packages

• Clone this repo with one of these options:

  • Click the 'Use this template' button at the top of the page
  • Or via the command line git clone https://github.com/netlify-templates/astro-toolbox

• Then install the necessary packages and run the project locally to make sure everything works.

  npm install
  npm run dev

Alternatively, you can run this locally with the Netlify CLI's by running the netlify dev command for more options like receiving a live preview to share (netlify dev --live) and the ability to test Netlify Functions and redirects.

2. Deploying

• Install the Netlify CLI globally npm install netlify-cli -g

• Run npm run build

• Then use the netlify deploy for a deploy preview link or netlify deploy --prod to deploy to production

Here are a few other ways you can deploy this template:

• Use the Netlify CLI's create from template command netlify sites:create-template astro-toolbox which will create a repo, Netlify project, and deploy it

• If you want to utilize continuous deployment through GitHub webhooks, run the Netlify command netlify init to create a new project based on your repo or netlify link to connect your repo to an existing project

Forms

Netlify Forms are a way to wire up your native HTML into being able to seamlessly handle submissions. To get a form working, we need to add two extra things:

1. An extra attribute on the form tag, netlify

Adding this attribute to our form tag will let Netlify know when it loads the page, that it needs to be aware of submissions made through it.

2. A hidden input in the form, <input type="hidden" name="form-name" value="feedback" />

Adding this extra input allows our form to be given a name that Netlify can store submissions to. It is a hidden input so your users won't see it but it will pass along the name of our form to Netlify when we submit. In our Netlify Admins site under Forms, we will see our Active Form named feedback and all submissions will go there.

With both of those we're ready for folks to give us feedback!

Adding a custom submission page

While Netlify provides a default submission page for folks, we can customize it as well! With the action attribute on the form tag we will be able to direct our users to our own page.

In components/FeedbackForm.js you'll see the form has the attribute action="/success" this will take our user to the custom route /success which we created under pages/success.js. As long as the page exists, you can direct folks to it!

Blocking bot spam with a honeypot field

Many bots scan through webpages and try to see what pages and forms they can get access to. Instead of letting our website receive spam submissions, we can filter out unrelated submissions with a visually-hidden input field.

<p class="hidden">
  <label>
    Don’t fill this out if you’re human: <input name="bot-field" />
  </label>
</p>

Since screenreader users will still have this announced, it is important for us to communicate that this is a field not meant to be filled in.

For this to work we also need to add a netlify-honeypot attribute to the form element.

<form netlify data-netlify-honeypot="bot-field" name="feedback method="POST" action="/success"></form>

See it here in the template code.

Forms Resources

• Netlify Forms Setup
• Netlify Forms
• Netlify Forms - Form Triggered Functions
• Netlify Forms - Using reCAPTCHA 2

Netlify Functions

With Netlify, you can build out server-side code without having to setup and maintain a dedicated server. Inside of our default folder path, netlify/functions you can see an example of the format for JavaScript functions with the joke.js file.

The function format expects an async function named handler to be exported.*

export const handler = async () => {
  // Your code goes in here!
}

• Note: ESLint may report that the async is unnecessary if there is no await code within the function, but the async is required. Do not delete it.

This will be the function that will be invoked whenever a client makes a request to the generated endpoints. The endpoint's format is followed as /.netlify/functions/joke. So whenever the site is deployed, if you go to https://<site base url>/.netlify/functions/joke you will see a random joke!

Side note: In our example, we're using import to include data from another location and export const const handler to let our function be consumed by Netlify. We're able to do this because of esbuild. This is a bundler configuration we set in our netlify.toml under [functions].

Netlify Functions Resources

There is quite a bit you can do with these functions, so here are some additional resources to learn more!

• Netlify Function Format
• Build Netlify Functions with TypeScript
• Event-triggered Functions
• What are Background Functions
• Netlify Functions - Examples
• Using esbuild as your bundler for new ECMAScript Features

Redirects

In the netlify.toml configuration file there is an example of how to implement redirects. Redirects can be used to do many things from redirecting Single Page Apps more predictably, redirecting based on country/language to leveraging On-Demand Builders for Distributed Persistant Rendering.

In the example we'll be using redirects to have a shorter endpoint to Netlify functions. By default, you call a Netlify function when requesting a path like https://yoursite.netlify.com/.netlify/functions/functionName. Instead, we'll redirect all calls from a path including /api to call on the Netlify functions. So the path will be https://yoursite.netlify.com/api/functionName, a lot easier to remember too.

Example

[[redirects]]
from = "/api/*"
to = "/.netlify/functions/:splat"
status = 200
force = true

First, we create a section in the .toml for the redirect using [[redirects]]. Each redirect should have this line to start the redirect code, and the redirects will be executed in the order they appear in the .toml from top to bottom.

The bare minimum needed is the from and to, letting the CDN know when a route is requested, the from, forward it on to another path, the to. In the example, we also added an 'Ok' status code, 200, and set the force to true to make sure it always redirects from the from path.

There are many ways to use redirects. Check out the resouces below to learn more.

Redirect Resources

• Redirect syntax and configuration
• Redirect options
• Creating better, more predicatable redirect rules for SPAs
• Redirect by country or language
• On-Demand Builders

Astro + Netlify Resources

Here are some resources to help you on your Astro + Netlify coding fun!

• Astro on Netlify Integration Page

• Build wicked fast sites with Astro: An Introduction

• A Template for Building Shopify Stores with Astro and the Storefront API

Hope this template helps :) Happy coding 👩🏻‍💻!

---

Project Structure

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

/
├── public/
│   └── favicon.ico
├── src/
│   ├── components/
│   │   └── Layout.astro
│   └── pages/
│       └── index.astro
└── package.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 or layouts.

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

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

Testing

Included Default Testing

We’ve included some tooling that helps us maintain these templates. This template currently uses:

• Renovate - to regularly update our dependencies
• Cypress - to run tests against how the template runs in the browser
• Cypress Netlify Build Plugin - to run our tests during our build process

If your team is not interested in this tooling, you can remove them with ease!

Removing Renovate

In order to keep our project up-to-date with dependencies we use a tool called Renovate. If you’re not interested in this tooling, delete the renovate.json file and commit that onto your main branch.

Removing Cypress

For our testing, we use Cypress for end-to-end testing. This makes sure that we can validate that our templates are rendering and displaying as we’d expect. By default, we have Cypress not generate deploy links if our tests don’t pass. If you’d like to keep Cypress and still generate the deploy links, go into your netlify.toml and delete the plugin configuration lines:

[[plugins]]
  package = "netlify-plugin-cypress"
-  [plugins.inputs.postBuild]
-    enable = true
-
-  [plugins.inputs]
-    enable = false 

If you’d like to remove the netlify-plugin-cypress build plugin entirely, you’d need to delete the entire block above instead. And then make sure sure to remove the package from the dependencies using:

npm uninstall -D netlify-plugin-cypress

And lastly if you’d like to remove Cypress entirely, delete the entire cypress folder and the cypress.config.ts file. Then remove the dependency using:

npm uninstall cypress