Setting up Astro

Published on: 2025-04-13

Why am I blogging?

I’ve been wanting to capture more of my learnings both for myself and for anyone else stumbling upon a similar problem or area of interest.

I actually started blogging about 20 years ago. Then I stopped shortly after because the PC in my apartment kept needing kernel updates that where a pain to maintain. Stopped a year or so later.

I resumed blogging about 15 years ago. That went on for a while with a handful of posts and then wound down as I finished graduate school and wanted to save a few bucks by not paying hosting fees.

What stack?

Astro + Azure Static Websites

I’ve been away from blogging tech for a while and performed a very short review looking for something that would be easy to manage. Astro caught my eye since with its positive reviews from bloggers, native MD support, easy integration with source control, and ability to host via a static website. The online tutorial was enough to get me running smoothly with the ability to generate content and the confidence that I can add functionality to the site some time in the future if a desire arises.

Settled on Azure Static Websites because I’m spending a couple of months jamming on the Azure stack and Azure Static Websites are nice fit for Astro.

More detailed steps

Couple of pointers from my setup:

• Docs at Build Your First Astro Blog
  • Note that the minimal template now ships with a page using a layout. I spent a couple minutes looking at that content. If I were starting over I’d drop the layout and replace the index with content from the tutorial. It gets to layouts soon enough.
  • Adjusted the tutorial to deploy via static web sites. See docs at Deploy your Astro Site to Microsoft Azure and Deploying an Astro Website to Azure Static Web Apps Totally optional, bit it fit my work flow.
• Hostname is being managed by Cloudflare. During validation of the registration for the www cname on the Azure Static Site page I ran into issues, resolved by disabling the proxy. Cloudflare supports using a CNAME the Apex domain via the magic of CNAME flattening. The docs for the Azure side are at .
• Tutorial continued on past what I want at this time. I’ve decide to move forward with just a core set of pages, MD based posts, a simple page layout with a standard header and footer, and slightly different layouts for the pages and blog posts.
• Bulk of the CSS styling was done by my good friend, Chat GPT.

Summary

The end.