Stacki
Visual Builder for Astro.
A shared visual editor for Astro: desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux, and a project-owned Studio hosted on Cloudflare.
MIT licensed — fork it, build on it, ship your own version.
Features
- Pages — browse every page in
src/pages, create new pages (including nested routes like blog/post-1), and delete pages.
- Layouts — choose which layout from
src/layouts wraps each page, and edit the layout's props (e.g. title).
- Components — every component in
src/components appears in the palette. Drag one into the page structure (or double-click to append), drag to reorder, click ✕ to remove.
- Props — the props panel reads each component's
interface Props / Astro.props destructure and generates typed fields (text, number, checkbox). Defaults are shown as placeholders.
- Live preview — the app runs
astro dev for the opened project and embeds it. Edits are auto-saved (300 ms debounce), so Astro's hot reload updates the preview as you type.
- Git & GitHub — the branch chip in the title bar shows the current branch and dirty state. From its dropdown you can switch branches, create branches, commit, push, or publish a brand-new repo to GitHub (via the
gh CLI).
- Tell an AI what's selected — ⇧⌘C copies whatever the canvas has selected as the trail of
file:line-range pointers that leads to it: the page, each component drilled into on the way down, then the node itself. Paste that into Claude Code or any AI chat that can read the project and it knows exactly which markup you mean.
- Code fallback — pages with markup too complex for the visual model open in a code editor instead, still with live preview.
- New project — "Start from Lumos" or "Start from Astro" creates a named site with the framework's own scaffolder and installs its dependencies for you.
Running in development
npm ci
npm --prefix studio ci
npm run dev
npm run dev starts Vite (renderer hot reload) and launches Electron against it.
To run against a production build of the UI:
npm start
Shared Studio source
The root src, shared, and electron directories are the canonical editor.
studio/ contains collaboration, Cloudflare hosting, and browser transport adapters.
npm run studio:build assembles the shared editor into studio/vendor/stacki before
building; never maintain that generated copy by hand. Native filesystem writes stay
in Electron. Hosted writes go through the authenticated Cloudflare Container draft.
The desktop installation uses its own editor version for every project it opens.
Each website can separately pin and customize its hosted Studio source. Releases
are opt-in per website and replace all Studio customizations while retaining the
website, deployment configuration, secrets, and drafts. See
Studio releases and updates.
npm run studio:install
npm --prefix studio/test/fixtures/site ci --ignore-scripts
npm run studio:dev
npm test # both packages' strict checks and test suites
npm run check:changed # routes changed files to their package checks
npm run studio:release # versioned source bundle
Studio uses its own dependency lockfile so native modules never enter its cloud
installation. Both artifacts use the root Stacki version and the same release feed.
Packaging installers
If you're building for yourself or from a fork, use the unsigned build — it
needs no Apple Developer account and no certificates:
npm run dist:mac:unsigned # .dmg + .zip, no signing (build on macOS)
npm run dist:win # NSIS installer (build on Windows)
npm run dist:linux # x64 .AppImage + .deb (build on Linux)
Output lands in release/. macOS will warn the first time you open an
unsigned build; right-click the app and choose Open to get past Gatekeeper.
The signed variants are for maintainers with the release certificates:
npm run dist:mac # requires a Developer ID cert + notarization credentials
Releases
Official builds are published by CI, not from anyone's laptop. Pushing a
v* tag runs .github/workflows/release.yml, which builds a signed and
notarized macOS builds for Apple Silicon and Intel, a Windows installer, and Linux x64
AppImage and Debian packages, plus a versioned Studio source bundle. It uploads them to the
stacki-releases repo and only
makes the release visible once every platform has landed and the Linux
packages pass installed-app smoke tests. Shipped apps auto-update from that feed via
electron-updater.
Linux installation
Download the .deb or .AppImage from the
latest release.
Official Linux builds support x86-64 desktops. The native terminal is built on
Ubuntu 22.04; installed packages are tested on Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04.
On Ubuntu or Debian, install the .deb with your package manager:
sudo apt install ./stacki_VERSION_amd64.deb
Replace VERSION with the downloaded version. Open Stacki from the application
menu or run stacki. The installer configures Chromium's sandbox helper, including
on Ubuntu 24.04. Updates use the same in-app update menu and may request your
administrator password to replace the installed package.
For other compatible glibc-based distributions, make the AppImage executable
and launch it:
chmod +x Stacki-VERSION.AppImage
./Stacki-VERSION.AppImage
Keep it in a writable folder so automatic updates can replace it. AppImages
need FUSE 2 and permission to create unprivileged user namespaces. On systems
that restrict those namespaces, use the Debian package where supported.
Chromium's sandbox remains enabled in both formats. Linux desktops need X11
or XWayland; native Wayland and ARM64 packages are not currently tested.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
