Blog Data

Starlight Blog exposes information about the blog posts and authors in your project. This guide explains how to use Starlight Blog’s data.

What is blog data?

Starlight Blog data is an object containing the information about all the blog posts and authors in your project. It includes information like a list of all the blog authors, a list of all the blog posts, the title of each post, the date it was published, and the author.

Using blog data

The posts property contains an array of all the blog posts in your project while the authors property contains an array of all the authors.

You can access this data from the Astro.locals.starlightBlog global in Astro components:

example.astro

---
const { posts, authors } = Astro.locals.starlightBlog
//        │       └─ The list of all blog authors
//        └─ The list of all blog posts
---

This can be useful for example to create a widget that lists recent blog posts with their word count on your homepage:

RecentBlogPosts.astro

<ul>
  {
    Astro.locals.starlightBlog.posts.slice(0, 5).map((post) => (
      <li>
        <a href={post.href}>{post.title}</a>
        <em>({post.metrics.words.total} words)</em>
      </li>
    ))
  }
</ul>

Preview

• Sequantur quaeritis tandem (239 words)
• Vario nunc polo (272 words)
• Mihi terrae somnia (315 words)
• Achivi amans (fr) (346 words)
• Ipsum nunc aliquet (346 words)

Another example is to create a list of all the known authors of your blog:

BlogAuthors.astro

---
const authorNames = Astro.locals.starlightBlog.authors
  .map((author) => author.name)
  .sort((a, b) => a.localeCompare(b, Astro.currentLocale))

const authorList = new Intl.ListFormat(Astro.currentLocale, {
  style: 'long',
  type: 'conjunction',
}).format(authorNames)
---

<p><b>Authors:</b> {authorList}</p>

Preview

Authors: Astro, Fantôme, Ghost et HiDeoo

starlightBlog

The starlightBlog object has the following properties:

posts

An list of all the blog posts in your project ordered by descending publication date.

Each post has the following properties:

title

Type: string

The title of the blog post.

href

Type: string

The link to the blog post.

createdAt

Type: Date

The date of the blog post.

updatedAt

Type: Date | undefined

The last update date of the blog post. It is only defined if the lastUpdated frontmatter field is specified and different from the date frontmatter field.

draft

Type: boolean

Whether the blog post is a draft. Draft blog posts are only visible in development mode.

featured

Type: boolean

Whether the blog post is featured.

cover

Type: { alt: string; image: ImageMetadata | string } | { alt: string; dark: ImageMetadata | string; light: ImageMetadata | string } | undefined

The optional cover image of the blog post.

Based on how the cover image is defined in the frontmatter of the blog post, it can either be a single image or a pair of images for dark and light themes. Local images are imported and transformed into metadata while remote images are defined as a string URL that you can pass as a src to <Image/> or getImage().

Check the Starlight Blog <Cover> component to see an example of how to use the cover image or learn more about images in content collections in the Astro docs.

entry

The Astro content collection entry for the blog post which includes frontmatter values at entry.data.

entry: {
  data: {
    description: string | undefined
    // etc.
  }
}

Learn more about the shape of this object in Astro’s Collection Entry Type reference.

authors

Type: StarlightBlogAuthorData[]

The list of authors of the blog post.

tags

Type: { label: string; href: string; }[]

The list of tags of the blog post.

Each tag has the following properties:

label

Type: string

The label of the tag.

href

Type: string

The link to the tag page.

metrics

Type: { readingTime: { minutes: number; seconds: number; }; words: { rounded: number; total: number; }; }

The metrics of the blog post.

readingTime

Type: { minutes: number; seconds: number; }

The estimated reading time of the blog post.

minutes

Type: number

The estimated reading time of the blog post in minutes, rounded up to the nearest minute.

seconds

Type: number

The estimated reading time of the blog post in seconds, rounded up to the nearest second.

words

Type: { rounded: number; total: number; }

The word count of the blog post.

rounded

Type: number

The word count of the blog post rounded up to the nearest multiple of 100.

total

Type: number

The total word count of the blog post.

authors

Type: StarlightBlogAuthorData[]

An unordered list of all the known authors in your blog.

StarlightBlogAuthorData

Blog post authors are represented by a StarlightBlogAuthorData object with the following properties:

name

Type: string

The name of the author.

title

Type: string | undefined

The optional title of the author.

url

Type: string | undefined

The optional URL to link the author to.