🚀 Astro + 🦕 Deno Template

This sample project contains a recommended starting point for your Deno project using Astro.

🛠️ Using this template

This template requires the Deno runtime to be installed on your computer. If you haven't already, please install Deno first. Next, initialize a new Astro project using this template with your favorite npm client, as described in the Astro docs.

npm create astro@latest -- --template denoland/deno-astro-template

GitHub will also let you use this repository as a template - use the green "Use this template" button near the top of the page to create your own copy of this application.

Why use Astro with Deno?

This template is preconfigured to use Deno rather than Node.js as the JavaScript runtime for this server-side rendering Astro application. This provides a few benefits:

• The ability to use built-in Deno namespace functions, notably the new built-in Deno KV database.
• The ability to run in production on Deno Deploy, a high performance, globally distributed platform for serverless JavaScript applications.
• Compatibility with the majority of packages on npm, both at the runtime level and via the Astro build process (thanks to Vite and esbuild).

Local development

To use this template for local development, you will use npm scripts in package.json in the same way as described in the Astro documentation. However, these scripts are configured execute the same commands using the Deno runtime instead of Node.js.

• Start the local development server with npm start or npm run dev
• Build a production-ready SSR site with npm run build
• After building, you can preview your SSR site locally with npm run preview

The template project lightly modifies the base Astro project with some basic CRUD operations to create additional resource links.

🔌 Managing dependencies, integrations, and plugins

We recommend using npm to manage dependencies for this project. Astro was designed to be used with npm, and enhanced with plugins and other tools also hosted on npm. Deno's Node/npm compatibility layer should be able to handle this just fine. If you run into any compatibility issues, please let us know.

🗝️ Using Deno KV

By default, the template project stores data in memory in a Map. If you'd like to instead use Deno KV to store your data, change the import statements in these files:

• src/pages/index.astro
• src/pages/api/resources.json.ts

to use resources_kv.ts instead of resources.ts. This will work for everyone locally on recent versions of Deno, but will only work on Deno Deploy if you have applied for and received access to the beta for KV.

🦕 🚀 Running on Deno Deploy

When you're ready to put this application on the Internet, you can run it on Deno Deploy. You have two options for doing so.

Deploy via GitHub Actions

• Create a new project on the Deno Deploy Dashboard
• Choose to "Deploy an existing GitHub repository"
• Choose your GitHub user and the repository where you are storing this application
• You will be prompted to add a .github/workflows/deploy.yml file that will automatically build and deploy your application on every push to the main branch.

The yml file's final build step should look like this:

- name: Upload to Deno Deploy
  uses: denoland/deployctl@v1
  with:
    # Replace with your Deno Deploy project name
    project: deno-astro-template
    entrypoint: server/entry.mjs
    root: dist

• The project property should be your new Deno Deploy project's name
• The entrypoint for our Astro SSR application is server/entry.mjs
• The root for our app is the dist folder

Once this file is committed to your repo, every push to main will result in a new version of your application being pushed to production.

Deploy from your desktop using deployctl

• Install the command line tools for deployctl and configure an API token environment variable as described here.
• Create a new blank project at dash.deno.com and note the generated project name
• Build the Astro site locally with npm run build
• Deploy the newly generated site in the dist folder with this command:

deployctl deploy --project=YOUR_PROJECT_NAME --no-static --include=./dist ./dist/server/entry.mjs

🤔 Caveats and limitations

The Astro build process still runs your Deno code through Vite and esbuild to generate your SSR site. This means that not all JavaScript and TypeScript language features will work exactly the same way - most notably, HTTPS module imports.

If you encounter situations where you require a Deno module that is only available via HTTPS import, or discover that there's a Deno runtime language feature that you can't live without, I would recommend writing Deno-specific code in a separate folder (say src-deno) and then using dnt to transpile that code into the main src folder, where you can import it in your Astro code. In reality, this should not be necessary all that often.

This template also uses a patched version of Astro's Deno SSR adapter in astro.config.js - this will eventually be removed once this pull request is merged and @astrojs/deno is suitable for use!

👩‍⚖️ License

MIT