9.2k stars · MIT · @astrojs/starlight@0.39.3 (2026-06-02)
Astro's own documentation theme — the content that ranks for months and gets quoted by AI assistants.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
The official documentation theme for Astro, built by the Astro team. Sidebar navigation, full-text search, syntax highlighting, dark mode and internationalised routing arrive configured; you write the pages as Markdown files in a folder.
Why it matters
Yesterday's edition argued that your React app cannot rank and Astro is the structural fix. This is the highest-return thing to put on that Astro site first — ahead of the blog, ahead of the landing-page rewrite. Documentation is the only content that earns twice: it ranks in Google for a specific question, and it is what an assistant actually quotes when someone asks "how do I make sense of a 400-message ChatGPT thread?". A blog post about AI trends decays in three months; a page called How Grasppy builds a subtopic map earns for a year and needs editing once. And the built-in internationalised routing means the Russian documentation from Layer 01 lands at /ru/ as a folder rather than a second project.
- MIT, and it is Astro's own theme — zero integration risk with the decision you already made
- Built-in i18n routing, so the Russian docs are a directory rather than a fork
- Search, sidebar, dark mode and code highlighting are included. You write Markdown and nothing else
- It is a docs theme and wants a docs shape. Bending it into a marketing homepage is more work than a blank Astro page
- Writing genuinely useful documentation is the real cost, and no tool removes it
- Still 0.x with frequent releases — pin the version and upgrade on purpose, not by accident
npm create astro@latest -- --template starlight cd my-docs npm run dev # preview at localhost:4321 npm run build # static HTML into ./dist
