Blogs are a great way to share your thoughts, ideas, and experiences with the world. They can be used for personal or professional purposes, and there are blogs on just about every topic imaginable.

Astro is a popular static site generator that can be used to create blogs, websites, and other types of online content. It is known for its speed, flexibility, and ease of use.

In this blog post, I will walk you through the steps of creating a blog with Astro. I will assume that you have some basic knowledge of Git and the command line.

Install pnpm and git#

I use Arch BTW, and so i can install Git from the Arch repositories. Instructions vary depending on OS and GNU/Linux distribution. pnpm is a faster drop-in replacement for npm.

sudo pacman -S git pnpm

Repo creation#

The next step involves creating a public repo on GitHub (to host your website). I’ll be creating a repo for GitHub Pages deployment. I recommend beginners create these repos from the web interface rather than (pushing to a remote from the command-line), but feel free to do it in any way you please.

After the repos are created, clone them to your local machine. In my case, I’m cloning my existing repo.

cd ~/Git/ # an arbitrary directory where all my Git repos live
git clone https://github.com/zstg/zstg.github.io.git
cd zstg.github.io

Install all the npm dependencies required for the blog:

pnpm i

Cool. Now we can start creating and uploading posts as we please! Run this (in the same working directory) to create a MarkDown, HTML or Org file, where your blog will be stored.

To preview the posts that you write, run pnpm build && pnpm astro preview from the project root directory.

$EDITOR src/content/posts/nameOfFile.md

ⓘ NOTE

The PAGE_SIZE variable defined in src/constants/constants.ts defines the number of articles allowed per page.

The file structure instead of src/content/posts does NOT matter, categories and tags are defined at the top of each file.

Edit src/content/posts/nameOfFile.md and add a brief intro to your post.

git add .
git commit -am "Add new content"
git push

Next up, we need to add a GitHub Action (provided by Astro) that deploys from our existing repo.

Create .github/workflows/deploy.yml with the following content. Ensure that Actions are enabled and that the Allow all actions and reusable workflows option is checked.

name: Deploy to GitHub Pages

on:
  # Trigger the workflow every time you push to the `main` branch
  # Using a different branch name? Replace `main` with your branch’s name
  push:
    branches: [main]
  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab on GitHub.
  workflow_dispatch:

# Allow this job to clone the repo and create a page deployment
permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout your repository using git
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install, build, and upload your site output
        uses: withastro/action@v2
        with:
            path: . # The root location of your Astro project inside the repository. (optional)
            node-version: 20 # The specific version of Node that should be used to build your site. Defaults to 18. (optional)
            package-manager: pnpm@latest # The Node package manager that should be used to install dependencies and build your site. Automatically detected based on your lockfile. (optional)

  deploy:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

After you push these changes to GitHub, the page should be generated after a while.

Fin#

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog!