Astro makes websites faster & easier to build

[@KevinPowell]

I've had a few people ask, and no, this isn't an ad, I just really like Astro a lot and thought I'd share it with you. If ever I do a sponsored video, it'll be marked as one and I will also mention it during the video... but I also don't do sponsored content anymore. Most I'll do is maybe have an affiliate link if the service has one, and it's a product I actively use and believe is good.

[@codokit]

It looks like ad because other opinions are cleaned from comments.

[@joachimd9586]

Hey Kevin, just wanted to let you know that I seriously appreciate all the effort you've put into making these videos. Sending warm greetings from Denmark! 💗

[@NECOdes]

@@codokit weird logic. Also, they're just buried under new comments, nothing's cleaned.

[@codokit]

@@NECOdes Thanks for letting me know. Dont know about this behavior.

[@KevinPowell]

​@@codokit I never remove any comments from my videos, with maybe a rare exception of something that's offensive, which luckily doesn't happen often at all. If a comment doesn't show up, it's been filtered by YT automatically.

[@Morrile1]

What I like about this video is Kevin has gone into more detail with examples (the only way I can learn) and would love to see building a multiple website using templates and more components.

[@Issvor]

Holy crap I didn't realize that Astro did this! I started with React and all but don't really take advantage of a lot of it, so I usually just use it to make components and scoped styling. Turns out Astro is right up my alley:)

[@zalodias]

Nice to see you jumping into a framework. I really appreciate you keeping it vanilla & simple in most videos, but a component-based environment with props is a must-have for web dev. Astro looks very lightweight, which is great!

[@andrewrea2799]

I’d be interested in more videos re building with Astro. I’m particularly interested in how I could use data files like Jason or csv and how I would handle multiple image files for responsiveness and performance and using a cdn. Hooking it all up to a CMS would be cool too.

[@cedrictheveneau9141]

As someone who started working with React 3 months ago, it now feels way easier to understand, while watching the video I was like « Okay, this makes sense because in React… » Sometimes, looking at someone coding really helps getting the hang of a concept, plus you’re a wonderful teacher Kevin, thank you for your hard work !

[@arielspalter7425]

By far the clearest and well paced tutorial of Astro. Subscribed!

[@diesieben07]

I love Astro! It has transformed how I work on websites, nice to see you looking at it! One thing I want add though: At about 6:40 you talk about just using element selectors in your components and how Astro keeps the specificity low using :where. This has actually bit me in the past, because the order of CSS from different components is not really guaranteed. So you might have your global ul styles overwrite your local component styles, which can be really nasty to debug. That's why I stick to using classes within my components still.

[@maurosquare1243]

Super easy and simple for who's (like me) don't know react/vue. Seems very easy to understand and use.

[@shayanzamani9907]

Event though I know some Vue, Astro is still a better choice for some kinds of websites (like the one I mentioned in another comment); specially performance-wise.

[@ko-Daegu]

@@shayanzamani9907 can i make a webapp like a chatapp with astro ? is it recommended or go with sveltkit

[@arabiccola]

It must be mentioned that ASTRO competes in the "meta framework" space, which is basically a framework on top of another framework (or library) such as React/Vue/Svelte. Thank you for bringing your excellent teaching skills outside of Vanilla HTML/CSS

[@aarontalua9456]

Watched this video before and I didn't understand a thing because I was focused on learning CSS from you. Now I'm starting to learn astro and this video showed on my feed. This is so much more helpful that I thought before. Thank you!

[@Anth-ony]

MOARRRRRRR! This was great and I'd love more videos using Astro starting from scratch with examples of different types of templates we could use.

[@TytusDubel]

i think I'd learn really well Astro if you'd be The Teacher. Seriously, you got a wonderful talent to explain things, easily..you make them look so obvious. Thank You Kevin.

[@oguching8379]

I like 11ty but as simple as it is, it can take some learning to get set up. These days most people know React or Vue, what Astro does well is go a step beyond 11ty and allow you use patterns you are already used to in React or Vue. I really like it. It feels like less to learn, like I already know how to use it. Thanks for the quick overview.

[@elhaambasheerch7058]

You explain complex javascript topics so well, looking forward to more framework tutorials in the future!

[@ember2081]

Love to see you making a vid on Astro, thought it'd be in your ballpark, not too divorced from plain HTML

[@KevinPowell]

Yeah, feels like a really nice natural progression instead of a steep learning curve, which I really appreciate :D

[@and_rotate69]

Bro makes 22min feel like 5min, i totally enjoyed the video, same goes for ur other videos.

[@christophersuarez1356]

Thanks Kevin, your demo was super easy to understand how Astro works. You explain super well. One thing that I noted is that this is almost the same as Svelte, except for the markdown content, but Svelte probably has a way to do something similar. I still need to check if Astro has something to add to the development with Svelte.

[@avidworkslol]

I used Astro once and instantly fell in love. Its simplicity is such a breath of fresh air compared to the other frameworks out there.

[@maddsua]

Before even watching the video, I want to point out that Astro is awesome! Been using it in productions for the last 2 months and I can't be more happy about it!

[@pablo_pmoura]

Man, how i love your content, definetly the best frontend youtuber we have! Thank You!

[@cindrmon]

i have grown so much interest in SSGs (especially Hugo, since I used it the most), and by far, this seems like one of the best SSGs I have ever found! Thanks for the wonderful introduction, and I think I wanna try astro right now

[@brentjackson6966]

Hi Kevin, Like yourself, lean towards writing vanilla HTML, CSS and JS. I'm generally dubious about frameworks and libraries. They take time and effort to learn, and then they add technical debt to a project - anyone coming to the project (even if it's yourself 6 months down the track) has to understand the framework and what it's doing to the code or they'll mess up what you've done. That said, you have sold me. Astro looks light enough and useful enough that it definitely merits further investigation. Thank you!

[@maptastik]

Thank you for exploring Astro with plain old HTML/CSS/JS. Web dev is a small part of my job, but I do enough that something like Astro could be useful. I don’t think that would have been as clear to me if you’d used, for example, React or Svelte.

[@spencerkeene]

I love this! I wanted something with reusable components that was easy to update for my personal website. This solution is much more lightweight than React and is insanely easy to update! The ability to add markdown so effortlessly is pretty cool as well.

[@artu-hnrq]

I've never saw Astro in depth before. It was nice to know it from your clean and calm explanation... Thankz

[@briankgarland]

Astro is great. In one week I learned how to use it then re-created on of our company's web sites as a proof of concept (used Contentful api to pull in product data). Awesome.

[@antontsvil245]

This is so cool. Im learning React a few weeks and seeing how everything related and linked with Js actually so useful!

[@iohn8688]

This has been great to help me understand Astro better, look forward to hopefully seeing more videos on it in the future, thanks.

[@EamonnCottrell]

Scoped styling = very cool! Thanks for this quick overview 👍👍

[@radvilardian740]

so glad you introduce this astro man, I am gonna use it to create my personal project's documentation.

[@juanferrer5885]

I like it so match that you're talking about Astro, please make more videos about it! Great content as always!

[@jadinethomas8935]

Damn those *MD files are amazing. I feel like they would be so easy to import/export. Knowing a bit of view js definitely made it easier.

[@xorbite]

Kinda nice to see what the possibilities are using Astro. Thanks a lot for the great explanation! As always, very clear and easy to understand :D

[@shayanzamani9907]

Thanks for this cool video. I had heard about Astro here and there, but never had the time to go check it out to see the problems it solves for myself. Actually, I need to refactor my old, personal website using almost vanilla everything and bring in some new features, but TBH, I was concerned about the performance since it needed lots of JS-related stuff, from multilingual features to components; And this video right here, opened the door to a way better solution for all that. :)

[@DanteMishima]

Whoop whoop ! My current site is built with Astro!

[@chrizzzly_hh]

Great beginner tutorial for Astro! One thing: the drawback using the components with md like you did in your example is that you haven't shown a way to actually sort those entries by date - which is mostly always the use case for blogs or - like in your example - job positions. It would be great to show of how to use templating properly with astro to achieve this with MD files (otherwise you would need to rename every file which would make it way more complex than the traditional way :) )

[@Yesar1]

Will you make a small project video on Astro with Svelte framework? It will be helpful for me and also for those who're interested in astro.

[@cseymour97]

I come from the world of wordpress and advanced custom fields. A lot of process and structure felt very familiar and I absolutely love astro! If at any point a client want something light and static it's my go-to!

[@borbelyviktor3057]

Very good content. Keep going! I just started with Astro and as an experienced developer I like its concepts.

[@genaroibc]

Astro is pure love ❤

[@kollinmurphy]

I've been using Astro since it became stable. It's amazing!

[@pebcak]

Great intro tutorial. I'm excited to start working with Astro.

[@thesearcher4892]

Thanks for the awesome tutorial. If you would do more tutorials about Astro, that would be just amazing. For example, it would be interesting how to integrate a headless CMS like Directus into Astro. PS: I love your channel :)

[@kieranbarker1902]

Great video! I've been meaning to look at Astro for a while and this was a really nice intro. ✨

[@netssrmrz]

Great video! Saves me having to read the Astro docs. Regarding Astro, not my cup of tea. Am happy with vanilla Web Components, JSON, and JavaScript. Didn't feel the savings on the keyboard justify the ugly generated code and additional project dependency.

[@danatronics9039]

Oh this is awesome. I had previously been using Express + EJS for this, but this looks like a good modern alternative.

[@uniqueux]

I've been using Astro to build my site and while I'm struggling I feel like it's a good step in my front end dev/UX career

[@nielslytzdk]

Astro is a fantastic tool, I fell in love with it right away 🙂. I would love a video about content collections, as I seem to struggle getting it to work.

[@Niksorus]

Great intro to Astro! I've moved to it for my portfolio website, and I keep using too much React 🤣 The Astro components look better, but it's so great I can bring so much old code over.

[@NECOdes]

Been hearing about it so much lately, but I was hesitant to use it because I'm still improving my vanilla js/css and html skill. But this looks nothing like other frameworks, and not much different from the vanilla. Passing parameters between components kinda reminds me of Ejs, I like it, I may try Astro for my next side project. Thank you for this video.

[@_Saike]

Kevin! you made my design life just a little bit less frustrated. Thank you for simple explanation.

[@chrishanthacosta4093]

Best astro intro!

[@ocratest]

Brilliant! This is a nice toe dip into the very overwhelming world of frameworks.

[@Action2me]

Instantly liked this video the second you mentioned Svelte

[@denizorsel1029]

I like the initiative eventhough the projects I am involved in requires much more complexity yet for simple things I will give it a try.

[@cryptoboy1461]

Astro is one of my favorite frameworks. Simple and easy to use. Love your videos👍👍

[@bobmarteal]

Great as usual. Would be interested in a short on points you might have for using Eleventy vs. Astro.

[@KevinPowell]

I love both. I just think Astro is easier to get started with, since you don't also need to learn a new templating language.

[@drucifer6]

Great video Kevin. Astro hopefully will shift the mindset of devs that over-engineer the most basic of projects.

[@rundtmeg]

Ohh Kevin! Please don’t suggest frameworks. Next year a new one will be better. I always liked your videos, because they teach the “web”, which will be valid for many years to come.

[@mucookul]

Thank You, this is actually what I needed to know about astro and you actually explained Props in a way I could understand.

[@Tausif_Khan_07]

We loved it we need more Astro content

[@phucnguyen0110]

I actually use Astro to learn and build scratch HTML + CSS sites, and even SASS/SCSS lol - it's just so convenient!

[@JoeTower]

Thank you for the video, Kevin! I would love to see more Astro videos from you. You explain things so well! I've started using Astro and love it, as well. One challenge I've found is: responsive images. Specifically, out-of-the-box responsive images. I'm always looking for a modern replacement to use for a Jekyll site, however, that replacement needs a responsive image setup that supports markdown use along with page-based use (.astro files, .mdx, etc). Anyway, do you have recommendations around creating a solid responsive image setup in Astro? I know Cloudinary is an option, but I'd prefer local asset image optimization and re-sizing.

[@wooviee]

This is a lot like Vue, but even easier. That's great!

[@ThomasProsserZurich]

I managed to publish the front of my wordpress site with it and since it loads all the content, it is blazingly fast. If you like, some alpine JS can help you manage state but there is no overhead! Only thin is that when I publish content, I need to rebuild but I guess that can also go into a wordpress hook somewhere. Add git to the mix and you can basically make a lightweight CI/CD system for your site that deploys in lightning speed

[@MsRobynM]

Great video! And yes, I'd like to see some more content on Astro.

[@herrlindner]

🎉 YES! Let's dig into Astro!

[@lmd4881]

fantastic, Astro is so cool :) would love to see a full project as a paid course and perhaps bring in some cool animations and how you do those in astro? would be nice :)

[@deeprelaxgarden]

Thank you for the awesome tutorial! What is the best way to make responsive layouts on Astro? media query on each components? It can be confusing when you have many small components to reuse them later... ?

[@brentgreeff1115]

This was amazing - I would love to see more. - I have used React, Vue but I really dont think they compare to my bread-and-butter - which is Rails. - Astro reminds me of web-components. - For content that should not change after deploy - this seems like a perfect choice. How about a contact-us page video, with Email provider integration, or anything where you are requesting data from or posting data to an API.

[@toxicsnails]

I really struggled getting the content out of markdown files. Glad to see it's not as straight-forward as the frontmatter bits!

[@erichobbs4042]

Perhaps I am being dim, but I really don't see what the advantage of using this would be. We've taken a very simple and straightforward design and added a bunch of extra complexity. I would think that creating the page using plain old CSS JavaScript and HTML would be faster and easier to understand than doing it this way. If you had a larger project with more complexity and dynamic data, well you would probably be using a tool like React and sourcing the data from a service API. So, it seems like it's too complex for small projects, and not robust enough for large projects. At least that's the way I see it. Other opinions are available 😊

[@KevinPowell]

A single pager like this might not be the best use case, but it had a few quick examples I could look at so I used it. It's an ssg out of the box (though it can do more), so any multiply-page site could easily use it. I had .md for those little things, but each one could be a full blog post based on a template layout. Just having templates for the nav, footer, and other repeated things so easily is a big win too. The amount of simple sites that I see that are using React, that have *no* need for it and just ship tons of JS to the client for no reason is nuts. I'm not saying this replaces React (you can even use react components in Astro), but it fills that middle ground.

[@erichobbs4042]

@@KevinPowell "The amount of simple sites that I see ... " Kevin, I could not agree with you more! I've worked on plenty of small projects for local businesses where the most advanced functionality is a contact form that winds up sending an email to the owners inbox, and someone decided that they needed React, or Vue or . That sort of gets to my point about Astro. I agree that it's not the same level of overkill as React, but at least from the examples in your video, you make a component out of the list, which is cool, but now instead of one piece of HTML and one CSS file, we have locally scoped CSS and additional non HTML files that get transformed into HTML at load time. This probably has minimal impact on the client side, but for the developer, it just feels like adding extra complexity to the site, and extra thinking time. I find that I spend a lot more time reading code as opposed to writing it, and I like to keep things as simple and readable as possible. Now, I'd be lying if I said that I have never been caught out by the bug of "I updated the entire site except for that one file...", and I can definitely see the value in using templates, especially from the perspective of keeping redundancy and repetition to a minimum. But you can do that already with a bit of vanilla JavaScript. And yes, that JavaScript adds some complexity as well, but at least it doesn't also add an additional dependency on a third-party tool. I admit that my workflow isn't the same as others, and I can totally see how somebody could look at this tool and feel like it's a good solution for their needs. Especially if JavaScript isn't their strong point. Horses for courses. I just wanted to say that I wasn't having a go at you or the video. It's great to see new ideas and technology, even if I personally am not going to be using this. I really appreciate your work and the fact that you took the time to respond to me as well.

[@nagymihaly8072]

Thank you for this! Could you (or have you) done a video about front-end frameworks, comparing them and which one should you use as a beginner?

[@JimKernix]

Definitely more videos on Astro!

[@Tez_Tickle]

this comes at the exact right time for me.

[@martyb4497]

A lot of frameworks like Vue and Angular have "slots" which does this. I do like the simplicity with its notation though. The Globs and md support was also intersting

[@twinlamp]

Astro is shipping a waaaay smaller bundle to the client though. You can solve any problem with just about any tool, it's always a question of right tool for the job.

[@KevinPowell]

Astro has slots as well, I just didn't see a good usecase to use them here. I guess I could have for the jobs, but I liked having them all in one place. And the .md stuff is great, but even better is using .mdx, cause then you can do the same type of thing, but with other components within those files instead of just basic markdown as well... I really looked at just a few of the very simple things here. It does *a lot* of what people are doing with things like React and Vue, but without having to ship a ton of JS, which is so nice. I see it as a great way to fill that middle ground for small and medium sized projects that don't really need all the bells and whistles of those libraries.

[@AMoktar]

Awesome 👏, thanks bro. Pretty straight forward ❤

[@AbhinavKulshreshtha]

A framework that is being praised by Kevin Powell himself, is a framework worth using. I skipped astro because I was already learning sveltekit at that time, but looks like I have to make try it out for my weekend projects.

[@professionalduckquack]

Seems like you can do everything astro do with svelte, looks very similar just little different on the syntax(?)

[@blokche_dev]

I'm in love with Astro!

[@Dafty23]

Wow, what an amazing video, thank you sir!

[@MaximeOnDev]

In which case would you use Astro with React ? Because that looks like it's working the same way! so I don't understand why

[@kirawesh]

Amazing. Reminds me of Hubspot language. Thank you for introducing ASTRO. I would like to know how it solves all the accessibility needs.

[@thomas-gk9jp]

Hey Kevin, your video + the one from developedbyed are really complementary, thank you so much for your content and sharing your (awesome) knowledge !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@mefesto_]

Nice to see using some frontend tools! Could you maybe show some good cases for Tailwind CSS? Where is this good where not? I saw some videos about Tailwind but my brain is blows up when I see so much classes on html tags 😄

[@MiniKodjo]

I wish Svelte worked like astro by default. I am building a simple static website and I wish I could use svelte components and syntax to generate pure JS less HTML files if you dont use any reactive features

[@michaelw4930]

When using the markdown files - did you find it more advantageous to use them over say a JSON file where you can map through the JSON? Just wondering - first time I have seen md files being used like this and found it really interesting. Just installed Astro this week and want to play around with it and this tutorial has really helped - appreciate it

[@CaliburPANDAs]

Kevin, please do more Astro content. Show how to use astro islands. please make video to build Blog website with CMS. thank u 🙏

[@DenisEneotescu]

This is the peak of tutorials.

[@channyeintun6411]

Hi Kevin, when are you going to publish your sass course again? I've been waiting it for very long.

[@nove1398]

Astro is pretty decent and not much indirection, i will definitely give it a try

[@CMB696]

Just blown my mind 🤯

[@prodbybarn]

Big fan, always an inspiration

[@vipe2383]

Was a really good video, could be cool to see more videos with technologies that you use like css framework (if you use one) or stuff like that

[@KevinPowell]

I don't use any frameworks, thankfully, but I also primarily work on my own projects these days, so I get to decide 😂

[@josegamarra3532]

Why is astro not popular yet, it looks Amazing and easy to use

[@Adrian-eq8ch]

Would you mind explaining why you used set:html on a tag? (timestamp 19:45) If set:html behaves like element.innerHTML, wouldn't generate a paragraph (and a heading, had you left the corresponding md in the content file) nested within another paragraph?

[@KevinPowell]

Good point! I should have inspected the elment there to see what was going on, might have been a small mistake there 👀

[@s1ckb0y100]

Cool stuff, thank you! What‘s the difference to something like Hugo in your opinion?

[@paulorodriguez6288]

man i really do love Astro, thank you for making a tutorial about it,

[@EugeneKoshelev]

Astro is pretty cool! Thanks!

[@homedecovibe]

Hi Kevin, amazing content. Thank you. Can you please make a full Astro video with fetching data from the API etc.