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Why we standardised on Astro 7 for every new site

Astro 7 shipped a Rust compiler, Vite 8, a native Markdown pipeline and stable route caching. Here is what changed, what broke, and why it is the right default for content-heavy sites in 2026.

Updated 2 min read

Astro 7 is the third major version in eighteen months, and it is the one that made us comfortable building a long-lived template on top of it. The headline features are performance-related, but the reasons we standardised on it are mostly about predictability.

What changed in 7.0#

  • The Rust compiler is the only compiler. Builds are faster, and the compiler is stricter: it no longer closes tags for you or reorders invalid HTML, so template mistakes surface at build time instead of in the browser.
  • Vite 8 drives both the dev server and the production bundler, with Rolldown under the hood.
  • Sätteri is the default Markdown pipeline. It parses Markdown and MDX in Rust and runs plugins in JavaScript. The template uses it as-is; the classic remark/rehype pipeline remains one import away if you depend on a specific plugin.
  • JSX whitespace rules by default. compressHTML: 'jsx' strips whitespace between elements the way React does, so a space between two inline elements must be written as {' '}.
  • Advanced routing is stable, which is why src/fetch.ts is now a reserved file name.
  • Route caching (cache and routeRules) is stable, giving on-demand pages CDN-aware caching without platform-specific code.

What we rely on from Astro 6#

Several features the template depends on landed in 6.0 and matured through 7.x:

Feature Used for
Fonts API Self-hosting Inter and JetBrains Mono with generated fallback metrics
Content Security Policy Per-page script and style hashes without a nonce server
Content Layer collections and custom loaders Docs, blog, legal pages and the changelog loader
Responsive images layout: 'constrained' with build-time styles that survive CSP
astro:env Type-safe public environment variables

The trade-offs we accepted#

Shiki and CSP

Shiki highlights code with inline style attributes. A strict CSP would block them, so the template relaxes only the style-src-attr directive. Scripts stay hash-only. If you need a fully strict policy, switch markdown.syntaxHighlight to Prism and ship a Prism stylesheet.

We also chose not to use Astro’s <ClientRouter />. It is incompatible with the CSP implementation, and the native cross-document View Transitions API now covers the common case with a single CSS rule.

Why it is the right default#

For sites that are mostly content with a few interactive islands, Astro 7 ships no client JavaScript unless a component asks for it, and it does so with a single mental model: everything is static unless you opt out. The tooling around it (adapters, integrations, the Container API for testing) is mature enough that a template can encode good defaults once and keep them for years.

The upgrade guides for v6 and v7 are short reads; both are worth an hour if you maintain an older Astro site.