Astro with Keystatic CMS

This initiative is wonderfully self-referential: it is the site you are reading right now. froodx.net is an Astro build wired to a Keystatic CMS and hosted on Cloudflare, and getting that combination working smoothly turned out to be an adventure worthy of its own entry in the Guide.

Eddie, the Heart of Gold’s shipboard computer, was endlessly enthusiastic and occasionally unbearable about it. A good CMS is the calmer cousin of Eddie: always available, genuinely helpful, and content to let you get on with the actual writing rather than narrating it back at you.

How it fits together

• Astro renders fast, content-driven pages with almost no client-side weight.
• Keystatic stores every page and post as Markdown or MDX, straight in the GitHub repository. No separate database.
• Cloudflare Pages hosts it, rebuilding automatically whenever content is committed.
• Editing locally writes to files; editing live commits through GitHub. Same content, two front doors.

The lesson, dearly bought

When a thing breaks with no error and a blank page, reproduce the running system and look at the actual configuration. Do not theorise endlessly from the source code. A blank Keystatic screen once cost two solid days, and the culprit was a single wrong permission on a GitHub App. Mostly harmless, eventually.