Starlight is a documentation website framework built on Astro. It provides a ready-made foundation for publishing project guides, reference material and other technical documentation without requiring authors to design an entire website from scratch.
The framework uses Astro’s content and rendering system while adding functionality specifically intended for documentation. Authors can organise their material into pages and navigation groups, with the framework handling presentation, accessibility and navigation. Documentation can be written in Markdown, Markdoc or MDX.
Starlight is particularly useful for software projects that want a professional documentation website while retaining control over its design. Its integration with Astro allows developers to extend the basic framework with custom components, content integrations and additional functionality rather than being restricted to a fixed collection of page templates.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Generates documentation websites using Astro’s static rendering system.
- Supports Markdown, Markdoc and MDX authoring formats.
- Includes built-in site search, navigation menus and documentation sidebars.
- Automatically generates sidebars from the content directory or uses manually configured navigation.
- Internationalisation supports multilingual documentation and translated interface elements.
- Provides responsive layouts designed for accessible documentation websites.
- Includes light and dark appearance modes.
- Syntax highlighting supports source-code examples in numerous programming languages.
- TypeScript-based frontmatter validation helps detect invalid document metadata.
- Supports custom components built with React, Vue, Svelte, Solid and other Astro-compatible technologies.
- Theme customisation allows changes to typography, colours, layouts and site branding.
- Supports Astro integrations and Starlight plugins for additional functionality.
Website: github.com/withastro/starlight
Support:
Developer: Astro contributors
License: MIT License
Starlight is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Documentation Generators | |
|---|---|
| JSDoc | API documentation generator for JavaScript |
| Javadoc | Generate API documentation in HTML format |
| Sphinx | Create intelligent and beautiful documentation for Python projects |
| phpDocumentor | Complete documentation solution for PHP |
| Doxygen | Documentation system for C, C++, Java, Python and other languages |
| Docusaurus | Build, deploy and maintain documentation websites |
| mdBook | Create modern online books from Markdown files |
| YARD | Ruby documentation tool |
| Starlight | Documentation website framework |
| Docco | Literate-programming-style documentation generator |
| Natural Docs | Documentation generator that supports 21 different languages |
| Quarto | Scientific and technical publishing system |
| Antora | Modular documentation site generator |
| Crycco | Quick and dirty documentation generator |
| ROBODoc | Documentation tool similar to Javadoc |
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