Site kit
The site kit is an open-source kit for building client websites with Astro, made so that people and AI agents can change a site with ordinary file edits. It's MIT licensed, and its code is on GitHub. These pages describe release v0.7.0: check the releases for a newer one.
See it on a live site: Kestrel, a home repair business built from the kit's basics example.
What a kit site is
- Content in files. Pages, blog posts and settings are Markdown and YAML files in the site's repository, so every change is a commit you can review, preview and undo.
- Pages made of sections. A page is an ordered list of typed sections, such as a hero, a services grid or an FAQ, from a library of 15 section types. A site can add its own types.
- Its own design. A new site starts as a copy of an example, with the example's look as a theme in the site's own files. A kit update never changes how a site looks.
- Rules for AI agents. The kit ships
AGENTS.md, which tells an agent what it may change and which checks to run before a change goes live. - Checks. The build fails on content that breaks its schema. Other commands check that the old site's URLs still have pages and that the theme styles every part of the kit's markup.
- Deploys. A GitHub workflow deploys
mainto the production site and every other branch to a preview site on Hostsmith.
Two ways to use it
| A kit site | The core, in an existing Astro site | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts from | one of the kit's examples | your own Astro site |
| Pages and layout | the kit's, with your own sections and templates where you need them | yours, unchanged |
| Design | a theme from the example, owned by the site | yours |
| What the kit adds | everything on this page | a description of the site's content for CMS editors and checks, a generated Decap CMS config, text coverage and URL checks, deploys |
Start a kit site for a new client site, or for a small business site moving off another platform: the kit was built first for sites moving from Webflow, and keeps their old URLs. Add the core when the site is already built in Astro and its pages should stay as they are, with its content in the repository or in a headless CMS.
It runs on any host
A kit site builds to plain static HTML in dist/, which any static host can serve. Hostsmith appears only in the deploy workflow, and the site needs no Hostsmith code to work. What Hostsmith adds:
- a production site and a preview site for every branch, deployed by the workflow;
- the client's own domain, with its certificate;
- a choice of where the site's files are stored: the US or the EU data partition.
What it doesn't do yet
- No editor for your client. A client asks for a change, you make it in the repository, yourself or with an AI agent, and send them the preview link to approve. The site holds a Decap CMS configuration, but no editor is deployed with it.
- Static output only. No page is rendered on request, so there are no server routes, and a site whose content is in a headless CMS shows published content only, with no draft previews.
- No contact form section yet. A form on a kit site is the site's own markup, posting to a form service.
- Before 1.0. A release can still change what a site's files must hold. When one does, its release notes give the steps, and so does the kit's README: see Kit updates.
Where to next
- Start a site - create a site from an example and run it locally.
- Content - pages, sections, collections and settings.
- Deploy with Hostsmith - previews of every branch, then the client's domain.
- Existing Astro sites - add the core to a site you already have.