I usually combine remark-parse, remark-rehype and rehype-react to transform markdown into react components. The configuration of the processor is like:

remark-rehype: remark plugin that turns markdown into HTML to support rehype.

The trouble is when i use use remark-rehype each item from the frontmatter gets converted to either a

Astro supports Markdown input files out of the box as well as remark and rehype plugins.

Name Email Comment Submit

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You see the Turnstile code we needed to add is minimal. We add a script tag in the HTML head section (line 7). Then, the little widget which shows up below the submit button (line 25).

We are using the platform here; we use built-in JavaScript APIs to submit the form. You will see the form has ${siteUrl}/api/message as the action. That is the route we will set the form handler to listen on.

Turnstile Verification Process

When a user visits the page, the widget runs in the background and decides if the user is a bot or not (traditionally a user challenge would have been used here). The script sends data from the client browser to Cloudflare. Cloudflare then responds with a code. We use that code server-side to check if the visitor passed the Captcha (more on that later). The Turnstile JavaScript code we added will automatically add an extra field with that response code. This is how we get the code from client to server.

Form Styling

Spruce up the form a touch with some extra styles at the bottom of src/components/CommentForm.svelte:

    button {
        all: unset;
        cursor: pointer;
        background-color: var(--colour-light);
        color: var(--colour-brand);
        padding: var(--spacing-2);
        margin-bottom: var(--spacing-6);
        font-size: var(--font-size-3);
        font-weight: var(--font-weight-bold);
        text-align: center;
    }

    button:focus {
        outline: var(--spacing-px-2) solid var(--colour-alt);
    }

    button:focus,
    button:hover {
        background-color: var(--colour-light-alpha-90);
    }

    textarea {
        resize: none;
    }

    button,
    input,
    textarea {
        border-radius: var(--spacing-1);
    }

    input,
    textarea {
        text-indent: var(--spacing-2);
        line-height: 1.75;
        margin-bottom: var(--spacing-4);
        border-radius: var(--spacing-1);
        border-style: none;
        font-size: var(--font-size-2);
    }

    .cf-turnstile {
        margin-left: auto;
    }

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🥹 Thank you Page

Before we jump to the form handler, let’s add a thank you page. We will show this on successful form completion. Create src/pages/thanks.astro with this content:

---
import Layout from '~layouts/Layout.astro';

export const prerender = true;
---


    
        
Thanks for submitting your comment!
        
We will be in touch
    



    body {
        background-color: var(--colour-theme);
        color: var(--colour-dark);
    }

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🍶 Server-Side Form Handler

We are on the home straight now. Once we add the form handler, all we will have left to do is test! In Astro, API routes follow the same file-based routing system as HTML pages. The main difference is that the file extensions are different. Create a src/pages/api folder and in there, add message.ts with the following content:

import type { APIRoute } from 'astro';

const siteUrl = import.meta.env.PUBLIC_SITE_URL;
const turnstileSecret = import.meta.env.TURNSTILE_SECRETKEY;

export const post: APIRoute = async function post({ redirect, request }) {
    try {
        const form = await request.formData();
        const name = form.get('name');
        const email = form.get('email');
        const comment = form.get('comment');
        const turnstileResponse = form.get('cf-turnstile-response');

        const ip = request.headers.get('CF-Connecting-IP');

        if (typeof turnstileResponse === 'string') {
            const bodyFormData = new FormData();
            bodyFormData.append('secret', turnstileSecret);
            bodyFormData.append('response', turnstileResponse);
            ip && bodyFormData.append('remoteip', ip);
            const response = await fetch('https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/siteverify', {
                method: 'POST',
                body: bodyFormData,
            });
            const { success } = await response.json();

            console.log({ name, email, comment, success });
        }

        return redirect(`${siteUrl}/thanks`);
    } catch (error: unknown) {
        console.error(`Error in comment form submission: ${error as string}`);
        return redirect(`${siteUrl}/`);
    }
};

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Again we are using standard JavaScript APIs for form handling. Remember we said Turnstile adds an extra form field for us? We pull this in in line 12. The final part of the verification process is to send the client response to Cloudflare, along with our secret Turnstile API key. The server replies with a JSON object including a success field. As you might expect this is false when Turnstile assesses the visitor to be a bot and true otherwise.

In a real world app, when success is true we would want to commit the comment data to our database as well as any other processing needed. We just do a console log here instead. Also in a production app, we should want to do some sanitisation before inserting the data to the database. On top we would have some validation so we do not commit junk to the database. If the comments will be displayed publicly you will also need to filter them checking for inappropriate user-submitted content.

Returning to our basic example, finally we respond with a redirect pushing the visitor browser to our new Thank You page (line 30).

💯 Astro Comment Form: Testing

Try submitting the form from your dev server. If all goes well, you should see the Thank You page.

To build the site locally we need to run in a Cloudflare wrangler environment. Add an extra script to the project package.json file to handle this:

{
    "name": "astro-prerender-comment-form",
    "type": "module",
    "version": "0.0.1",
    "private": true,
    "scripts": {
        "dev": "astro dev",
        "start": "astro dev",
        "build": "astro telemetry disable && astro build",
        "preview": "astro preview",
        "preview:cf": "wrangler pages dev ./dist",
    },
    // TRUNCATED...

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Then run the script from the Terminal:

pnpm preview:cf

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This time the site will be available at http://localhost:8788. If this is your first time running wrangler from your machine, follow the instructions in the Terminal to log in.

Remember to update PUBLIC_SITE_URL in your .env file to match the new URL (otherwise the form will not submit as expected).

That’s it! You can now try pushing to Cloudflare Pages. Create a set of Turnstile credentials for you actual public domain first.

🙌🏽 Astro Comment Form: Wrapping Up

In this post, we saw how you can add a server-side form handler to your static Astro site. In particular we saw:

• how to add Turnstile Captcha in Astro,
• how Astro Hybrid rendering and prerendering work,
• some points to consider in a full production comment form.

You can see the full code for this project in the Rodney Lab GitHub repo. I do hope you have found this post useful! I am keen to hear what you are doing with Astro and ideas for future projects. Also let me know about any possible improvements to the content above.

🙏🏽 Astro Comment Form: Feedback

Have you found the post useful? Would you prefer to see posts on another topic instead? Get in touch with ideas for new posts. Also if you like my writing style, get in touch if I can write some posts for your company site on a consultancy basis. Read on to find ways to get in touch, further below. If you want to support posts similar to this one and can spare a few dollars, euros or pounds, please consider supporting me through Buy me a Coffee.

Finally, feel free to share the post on your social media accounts for all your followers who will find it useful. As well as leaving a comment below, you can get in touch via @askRodney on Twitter, @[email protected] on Mastodon and also the #rodney Element Matrix room. Also, see further ways to get in touch with Rodney Lab. I post regularly on Astro as well as SEO. Also subscribe to the newsletter to keep up-to-date with our latest projects.

You can see the full code for this project in the Rodney Lab GitHub repo. I do hope you have found this post useful! I am keen to hear what you are doing with Astro and ideas for future projects. Also let me know about any possible improvements to the content above.

Take a look at the full project code on the Rodney Lab GitHub page. I hope you found this article useful and am keen to hear how you will the starter on your own projects as well as possible improvements.

Open up the Astro project we referenced from the Rodney Lab GitHub repo to play around.

You can see the code for the demo in the Rodney Lab GitHub repo.

The Astro JS Sass styling demo code is in the Rodney Lab GitHub repo. You can also try it on Stackblitz.

Svelte Component { altColours = !altColours; }}>Toggle colours .container { display: flex; flex-direction: column; background: hsl( var(--colour-brand-hue) var(--colour-brand-saturation) var(--colour-brand-luminance) ); align-items: center; width: 100%; padding: var(--spacing-8) var(--spacing-0); color: hsl( var(--colour-dark-text-hue) var(--colour-dark-text-saturation) var(--colour-dark-text-luminance) ); } .container-alt { background: hsl( var(--colour-secondary-hue) var(--colour-secondary-saturation) var(--colour-secondary-luminance) ); color: hsl( var(--colour-light-text-hue) var(--colour-light-text-saturation) var(--colour-light-text-luminance) ); } .button { background: hsl( var(--colour-secondary-hue) var(--colour-secondary-saturation) var(--colour-secondary-luminance) ); } .button-alt { background: hsl( var(--colour-brand-hue) var(--colour-brand-saturation) var(--colour-brand-luminance) ); }

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Fonts

We mentioned that we are using self-hosted fonts above. For the hosting to work,we need to include the fonts in our repo so our host can serve them. Download the Roboto Font in Regular, 400 and 700. Extract the zip and then create a new fonts folder in the project’s public folder. Drop the four unzipped files in that folder. The public folder is for anything which we do not need Astro (or Vite, under the hood) to process. As well as fonts, web manifest files for PWA and favicons fall into this category.

We won’t optimise fonts here, just to get finished a little quicker. There is a nice video which focusses on self-hosted fonts in Astro together with optimisation. If you are interested in optimisation, do take a look. You can save 80% on some fonts files, especially where, for example you only use the 900 weight font in titles.

🍧 Hosting

The app should be working just fine now, with a nice Roboto sans serif font and all the colours. Try pressing the buttons below the React and Svelte components to check they work. You should notice the background colour change.

The next step is to build the site locally to check it is all working as expected. Run these commands to build and preview the site (stop the dev server with ctrl + C first):

pnpm run build
pnpm run preview

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If all is well, commit the code to a git repo and upload it to your GitHub or GitLab account, so we can host it as a static site. You might notice your site gets built to the dist directory in your project. There is no need to include this in your repo as your host will generate the site there for you.

It is worth adding a .nvmrc file to the project root folder whichever host you are using. This will tell the host know which version of node to use. We will go for the long-term support (LTS) version which is 16 at the time of writing:

16

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Configuration

Although we have used pnpm in this tutorial to build the site, for maximum compatibility, in the cloud use npm run build as your build command. We just mentioned that Astro outputs projects to the dist directory, so on your host console, set the build output directory or publish directory to dist.

Here are screenshots for Netlify and Cloudflare Pages which should help you out. Other services will be similar. Select the Astro preset if your host has one, then just check the build command and output / publish directory is dist.

🙌🏽 Astro JS Tutorial: Wrapping Up

In this post we have run through the pipeline for building a static Astro site. We have seen:

• how to spin up a new Astro project with Svelte and React integrations,
• how you can add global CSS styles, local scoped styles and style React components with plain CSS,
• configuration for deploying your static Astro site to the cloud.

The Astro JS tutorial code is in the Rodney Lab GitHub repo. You can also try it on Stackblitz.

I hope you found this article useful and am keen to hear how you will the starter on your own projects as well as possible improvements.

🙏🏽 Astro JS Tutorial: Feedback

Have you found the post useful? Would you prefer to see posts on another topic instead? Get in touch with ideas for new posts. Also if you like my writing style, get in touch if I can write some posts for your company site on a consultancy basis. Read on to find ways to get in touch, further below. If you want to support posts similar to this one and can spare a few dollars, euros or pounds, please consider supporting me through Buy me a Coffee.

Finally, feel free to share the post on your social media accounts for all your followers who will find it useful. As well as leaving a comment below, you can get in touch via @askRodney on Twitter and also askRodney on Telegram. Also, see further ways to get in touch with Rodney Lab. I post regularly on Astro as well as SvelteKit. Also subscribe to the newsletter to keep up-to-date with our latest projects.

The full code for the app is available in the Astro demo repo on Rodney Lab GitHub.

Before proceeding, download some self-hosted fonts which we will use on the site. Save raleway-latin-400-normal.woff2 and raleway-latin-700-normal.woff2 together with raleway-latin-900-normal.woff2 to a new, public/fonts directory within the project.