It's time for some exciting updates about Astro, Starlight, and a small sample from our monthly What's New? blog post.

Be sure to check out the whole post for everything you might have missed from the last month! 🚀

Notable Releases

Minor releases introduce new features and improvements. Pre-releases introduce breaking changes, stabilize features, and provide improvements. Check out what's new!

• Astro 5.17 - configurable dev toolbar placement, support for partitioned cookies, powerful new image optimization options, and more!
• Astro 6.0-beta-6 - the latest beta release of Astro v6 and sneak peek of the v5 -> v6 upgrade guide draft if you're adventurous enough to try it.

Upgrade Astro regularly for all the latest goodies!

Community News

Astro Team News

Please join us in welcoming our newest Astro maintainer, Shinya Fujino! You may recognize Shinya from their annual Astro "Year in Review" blog posts! Shinya contributes to docs and Starlight, and is a leader in the Japanese Astro community. We are excited to have you on board!

Shout-outs

Think we don't notice you? Think again! This month, we'd like to give some 🌮 to:

• ocavue for all their help with v6 prep!
• rururux for contributing helpful PRs!
• pascal-brand38 for handling issues and updates to our integration directory!

See more about what's happening in the Astro community →

The Top 10

Here’s what caught our attention this month:

1. [Survey] In January, Astro was a Top Trending GitHub Repository and appeared in JavaScript Rising Stars 2025.

2. [Video] Learn (with Jason!) why Marcy Sutton left Gatsby for Astro.

3. [Article] The verdict is in: "Performance: Actually, Genuinely Fast" now that Lewis Kori migrated From Gridsome to Astro: Rebuilding My Personal Site for the Next Phase.

4. [Tool] Expressive Code Typewriter by frostybee is an Expressive Code plugin to add typewriter-style typing animations to your code blocks.

5. [Article] Read the case study of Shift64 - Built with Astro who needed a framework that matched their philosophy: speed, flexibility, and no unnecessary bloat. Astro was the natural choice.

6. [Tool] Accessible Astro Launcher by Mark Teekman is an accessible and powerful launcher (command palette) for Astro websites, built with WCAG compliance and inclusive design principles.

7. [Video] See why Astro keeps showing up in WordPress dev circles and hear from Adam Lowe why it might be relevant to the kinds of sites agencies actually build.

8. [Tool] Starwind UI form builder is a free online tool to build forms visually and export production-ready Astro code.

9. [Article] Bryan Guffey shows how to bring your Astro blog to ATProto with astro-standard-site to making your content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere.

10. [Tool] Starlight Tags by frostybee is a plugin to add tags to your Starlight docs for content organization and discovery.

11. [Bonus: 🧑‍🚀] The Astro Technology Company joined Cloudflare

. . . and you had lots to say about it! See some takes from around the industry and community, including Awesome, Coding in Public, and midudev.

But Astro is still an open-source, MIT-licensed codebase with open governance, a public roadmap, and thousands of community contributors. Corporate and individual sponsorship goes directly to Astro's community maintainers and various parts of the project (like this very newsletter!) so consider learning about our financial model and supporting the future of Astro.

See more articles, guides, videos, and tools in our full blog post →

Now using Astro: Harvard University

See more Astro adopters →

Weird Wide Web: Tipping Point

Weird Wide Web: Roast Dinners in London

See more innovative, quirky, inspiring, empowering, or just plain fun websites built with Astro →

Cosmic Canvas: Astro Infinity

See more stunning and creative sites built with Astro →

Theme of the Month - Darkness

See more new themes and templates →

That’s a wrap! 👋

That's it for this month! For the full round up, with several more sites, articles, videos, tools, and themes, see our What's New in Astro monthly blog post!

Follow us on social media for even more good stuff from around the community:

• 🦋 @astro.build on Bluesky
• 🦣 @astro@webtoo.ls on Mastodon
• 🐦 @astrodotbuild on X
• 💼 withastro on LinkedIn

Want to be featured in next month’s newsletter? Post your Astro websites, projects, apps, tools, blog posts, demos, and videos in our ⁠#showcase channel in our Discord!