Day21 - Astro Series: Deploy

@ Astro

A beautiful gradient background with a title: "Deployment Lift-off"

Introduction

This chapter covers most of the Astro features you’ll commonly use. Subsequent chapters will focus on additional environment setups. Let’s put the site we’ve built onto a server so others can visit it.

SSR vs Static

So far, the tutorial has used Astro in a static-generation approach,

meaning pre-rendered HTML files can be placed on a server and served as static assets. If you need to host an SSR (Server Side Rendering) site, you can choose a cloud provider that offers the corresponding services.

If you want to review dynamic vs static sites, revisit Day 2: Astro 系列文第二日：現有問題與解方🔗

My experience

The documentation from each platform is already quite comprehensive — go take a look: Deploy Guides - Astro DOCS🔗.

  • Netlify🔗 has excellent integration and developer experience. It’s worth trying and makes deploying via a GUI very straightforward, which is great for beginners.
  • GitHub Pages is serviceable, but be careful with asset paths requiring the repo prefix. For example, if your project is stored on GitHub as accountname/my-project, the default GitHub Pages URL will be https://accountname.github.io/my-project — you must manually include the my-project prefix, which can be handled with the base setting🔗. Of course, you can also use your own domain.

Pick a deployment platform you feel comfortable with. I use Cloudflare Pages🔗 because their CDN is well-known and it’s a great choice for deploying static files; their docs are simple and the experience has been good so far.

In fact, deploying static sites rarely reaches paid tiers — choose one that looks good to you and don’t overthink it.

Summary

The above are my experiences deploying static sites. Future posts will cover concepts, thoughts, and surrounding configuration topics.