Astro Starter Kit: Blog

npm create astro@latest -- --template blog

🧑‍🚀 Seasoned astronaut? Delete this file. Have fun!

Features:

• ✅ Minimal styling (make it your own!)
• ✅ 100/100 Lighthouse performance
• ✅ SEO-friendly with canonical URLs and OpenGraph data
• ✅ Sitemap support
• ✅ RSS Feed support
• ✅ Markdown & MDX support

🚀 Project Structure

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

├── public/
├── src/
│   ├── components/
│   ├── content/
│   ├── layouts/
│   └── pages/
├── astro.config.mjs
├── README.md
├── package.json
└── tsconfig.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.

The src/content/ directory contains "collections" of related Markdown and MDX documents. Use getCollection() to retrieve posts from src/content/blog/, and type-check your frontmatter using an optional schema. See Astro's Content Collections docs to learn more.

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:4321
npm run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
npm run preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
npm run astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check
npm run astro -- --help	Get help using the Astro CLI

Chatbot Setup (Saoirse)

The site now includes a chatbot page at /chat and a server endpoint at /api/chat.

How it works:

• It always grounds replies in your site content (src/content/blog).
• It has a safety override for crisis keywords and points users to /resources.
• If no AI key is set, it still returns useful fallback answers from your content.

Optional AI enhancement:

1. Add environment variables in your local env file:

OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_key_here
OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-4.1-mini
CHAT_ANALYTICS_ENABLED=true

2. Restart the dev server:

npm run dev

If OPENAI_API_KEY is missing, the chatbot still works using the built-in retrieval fallback.

Default chat API protections:

• Basic rate limiting: 20 messages per minute per client
• Crisis keyword routing: urgent language is redirected to /resources and emergency numbers
• Lightweight server analytics: logs status, message length, and source count (disable with CHAT_ANALYTICS_ENABLED=false)

👀 Want to learn more?

Check out our documentation or jump into our Discord server.

Credit

This theme is based off of the lovely Bear Blog.