Astro Weekly #77

Unlock powerful Markdown tricks, add interactivity with HTMX, explore how Astro 5.6 makes building even better

Author

Nathan Lawson
April 06, 2025

Hello, Astronauts!

Your weekly recap of all things Astro has landed—zero tariffs, 100% Astro.

While Earth argues about import fees, we’re busy importing Markdown like components and blasting dynamic UIs into orbit.

Elsewhere this week, Astro 5.6 touched down with Cloudflare-powered upgrades, smarter session handling, and more control over prefetching.

Strap in, it’s a good one. 🚀

What’s new with Astro 🗞️

Smarter sessions, sharper prefetching

Astro 5.6—Cloudflare, leveled up ☁️

Astro 5.6 is now available!

This release brings major improvements to Cloudflare support, more control over prefetching, and updates to experimental features.

Here’s an overview of eveything that’s new with Astro 5.6:

  • ☁️ Global astro:env on Cloudflare: You can now use environment variables globally in Cloudflare Workers—not just inside requests.

  • 🔐 Experimental Sessions on Cloudflare: Session storage is now auto-configured using KV, making session management easier than ever on Cloudflare.

  • 🚀 New Prefetch Eagerness Controls: Fine-tune how links are prefetched with eagerness settings—choose from immediate, eager, moderate, or conservative.

  • 🚧 Custom Fetch for Error Pages: Adapters can now define custom logic for fetching prerendered 404/500 pages.

  • 🍪 Manual session.load() Support: More control over session handling with a new method to load sessions by ID—great for APIs or cookie-less flows.

  • 🔍 Improved Config Validation: Get clearer errors when things go wrong in your astro.config.mjs.

  • ⚠️ Breaking Changes to SVG API: Experimental SVG support has been simplified—title, mode, size, and default role are now removed.

For all the details and code examples, check out the Astro 5.6 release post.

Astro Boosters 🚀

Learn Astro includes over 17 hours of content

A premium course for building modern websites using Astro 👨‍🏫

Learn Astro guides you to understand and use the fundamentals of Astro—from basic components to API Routes, middleware, auth, images, db, and more.

The course includes more than 175 lessons and 17 hours of content and finishes with three projects (CMS, CRUD, and a full-stack E-Commerce app).

Astro Weekly subscribers get 20% off—just click the link below to claim your discount!

Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

Mastering Markdown in Astro 🧩

In this video, Chris Pennington from Coding in Public explores the power of working with Markdown in Astro to build fast, content-rich websites.

Chris demonstrates how Astro treats Markdown as components, showing how to import, render, and loop through .md files—plus access frontmatter, HTML, raw content, and headings without a content collection.

Astro + HTMX—explosively good

Astro Meets HTMX—Dynamic UI, Minimal JS ⚡

Matthew Tyson explores the integration of Astro with HTMX to simplify server-side rendering for dynamic web applications.

Matthew demonstrates how Astro's flexible architecture allows developers to utilize HTMX for creating interactive user interfaces without extensive JavaScript.

What else caught my interest this week 🤓

Check out these great posts from the Astro Community ↓

If you have something awesome you’d like to share with the Astro community, you can reach me at [email protected] or via DM on X

Blazing-fast Astro themes ⚡

Launch your own link-in-bio within minutes

Say hello to Linkk—a sleek, blazing-fast link-in-bio template. 🔗

Built with Astro, Linkk is fast, minimalist, and fully yours—no branding, no nonsense. Perfect for developers and creators who want a self-hosted alternative to Linktree.

Early access pricing available for a limited time.

Astro on X 💫

What’s happening on Twitter X this week…

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. Luckily, you can join 1,000,000+ early adopters reading The Rundown AI — the free newsletter that makes you smarter on AI with just a 5-minute read per day.

Astro Showcase 🤩

Check out these impressive projects built with Astro!

HOMERUN Creative Things

At the crossroads of consulting & advertising, we design cultural innovations that create value and cross channel communications that spark conversations.

homerun.today

OAKSUN Studio

Transforming digital landscapes through precision-crafted JAMSTACK websites, innovative brand identities, and performance-driven design solutions.

oaksun.studio

And that’s a wrap on this week’s orbit! 🛰️

Got something cool you’re building with Astro? A tutorial, a tool, a spicy hot take? I’d love to share it in next week’s issue—just shoot me an email at [email protected] or drop into my DMs on X.

Until then, stay fast, stay Astro.

Catch you next Sunday, Astronauts!

– Nathan 👨‍🚀