Astro Weekly #31

Happy Tuesday Astronauts,

Following a week where real-world solar events treated millions to their first glimpse of the aurora borealis, the Astro core team was busy with some astronomical activity of their own.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll be discussing Astro’s hot new feature Astro Actions, faster build times in Astro 4.8, turning your Astro project into cash flow + more!

This week in Astro ☄️

Astro ready for Actions with 4.8 🎬

Astro is ready for action with the release of Astro 4.8. This release offers our first preview of the much anticipated Astro actions.

Actions make it easy to define and call backend functions with full type-safety from your client code:

• Call type-safe server functions from the client

• Validate input with Zod

• Progressively enhanced forms + FormData support

• Easy error handling

For more information on Astro actions, visit the experimental actions docs.

Astro 4.8 released ⚡️

Also included in Astro 4.8 is experimental support for request rewriting (render a different page), up to 20% faster build times, plus a welcome fix to the injectRoute function among other bug fixes and smaller improvements.

For a full breakdown of everything included with Astro 4.8, head on over to the official Astro blog.

Boosters 🚀

Build Modern Websites with Astro is a hands-on course to teach you how to build websites using Astro, the all-in-one framework for the modern web.

Taught by James Q Quick, the course covers:

• Astro components, Integrations, and Islands

• Routing, Pagination, and SEO

• Working with Content Collections, Markdown, and TypeScript

• Server-side Rendering, Authentication, and Databases

• Form Submissions and API Routes

• Lots more!

Plus, Astro Weekly subscribers can save 20% with code ASTROWEEKLY20

Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

First look at Astro Actions 🎦

Now that you’ve read all about Astro Actions, why not see them in action?

Chris Pennington is on hand to guide you through using Astro Actions inside a real project. Chris will demonstrate how to receive data from form inputs, validate it server-side using Zod, and effortlessly store it using Astro DB.

Collect Stripe payments with Astro 💳

Are you building your next side hustle with Astro? In this article by Zell Liew, you’ll learn how to collect payments with Stripe inside an Astro project.

Zell covers to how use advanced Astro features like server-side rendering and environment variables, as well as Stripe’s API to create a checkout experience so you can begin accepting payments in hours.

What else I’ve been reading this week 🤓

Check out these great posts from the Astro Community ↓

• 📊 Using the Microsoft Graph Toolkit with Astro

• 🚀 Website Optimization Using Strapi, Astro.js, and OpenAI

• 🚩 Feature flags with Astro + Vercel Toolbar

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

Astro on X 💫

What’s happening on Twitter X this week…

Direct link for web version:
https://twitter.com/TheJackShelton/status/1788622517084545039

Astro Showcase 🤩

It’s another portfolio special this week! Be sure to check out these personal projects from some of your fellow Astronauts.

Would you like your work to be featured in our Astro Showcase? Get in touch at [email protected] or DM me on X

Beyond the Astrosphere 🪐

What caught my eye outside of Astro this week…

• Headless UI 2.0 for React — unstyled, fully accessible UI components from Tailwind Labs

• Fluid — a fluid clamp() plugin for Tailwind that works with every utility

• GPT-4o — Open AI’s new flagship model that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time

That’s everything for this week, Astronauts.

Have something you’d like to share in next week’s issue? You can reach me at [email protected] or via DM on X.

Safe explorations out there!

– Nathan 🧑‍🚀