starlight VS sodium-fabric

Startlight

There are many excellent tools to choose from, such as Docusaurus, Nextra, VitePress, Docus, and others. Previously, I had a great experience building a documentation website with Starlight, so it was my choice for this task. However, I discovered a missing feature: the ability to generate a PDF from the documentation. And it was one of the requirements. "Sounds like a nice side project," I thought for myself.

Astro Starlight is a specialized theme for creating documentation websites. It's built on top of Astro, a modern web framework. It offers a set of features specifically designed for technical documentation while also benefiting from Astro's speed and performance.

Next, you build the site.\ Since SEO is a priority, server-side rendering (SSR) is a must. There's a lot of talk about Google being able to parse JavaScript, but that's mostly nonsense. Sometimes it can, but it generally hates doing so, so don’t risk it. You could use a heavy SSR setup for React or Angular, but we went with astro.build—super fast, simple, and elegant. They have plenty of free and complex themes, but we settled on their Starlight theme after tweaking the home page a bit (you need to copy the Hero.astro component and override Head.astro).

There are a lot of these documentation-geared SSGs. I've tried a few and Starlight is what rang least annoying of the bunch. No library lock-in, a sane theme, client-side search, a much smaller dependency tree than many, and quite fast to build.

https://starlight.astro.build/

Astro is awesome. It’s easy enough to get started with a template for a static site and flexible enough to build dynamic web apps.

My static personal site is Astro hosted on cloudflare pages https://github.com/ShaunLawrie/shaunlawrie.com

And I used their documentation template https://starlight.astro.build/ for my autogenerated docs on https://pwshspectreconsole.com/

I love having the ability to focus on the content and never having any blockers if I want to do something weird like embed a prebuilt react component for some edge cases.

Integrating live code editors within docs and tutorials is great.

Another example I saw recently using SQLite (compiled to Wasm) in the browser: https://docs.sqlitecloud.io/docs/sqlite

And if you ever want something similar for more general backend APIs (without relying on Wasm or the browser to run the software), https://codapi.org/ looks very slick e.g. as demonstrated in https://antonz.org/sql-upsert/

We ended up building a fairly bespoke setup for XTDB's docs (XTDB doesn't yet compile to Wasm) shortly before I came across Codapi, although our requirements were even more particular, e.g. see https://docs.xtdb.com/tutorials/financial-usecase/time-in-fi... - the backend here is https://github.com/xtdb/xt-fiddle which runs purely on top of Lambda Snapstart, and embedded within https://starlight.astro.build/ using Web Components

I've rewritten this website, my partner's website, my university rugby club's website. I'm moving my Applied Genomics course website to Starlight, the Astro team's documentation framework. The nf-core site has been rewritten in Astro and Svelte from PHP. I'm all in.

Go to Sodium's GitHub and under the release section, download the .jar file