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SvelteKit static blog starter

This starter contains everything you need to get up and running with SvelteKit as a static site generator for your Markdown (and Svelte)-powered blog. Check out the demo here, or view the GitHub repo here.

Features

  • ⚡️ Super fast static site generation with hydration. Every route is compiled down to static HTML and routed with (optional) JavaScript, thanks to the SvelteKit static adapter (pre-installed)
  • 📦 Zero-config prefetching for automatic, fast background preloading of all top-level pages
  • ✍️ Markdown support with a pre-configured blog
    • 📑 Pagination included (can also customize posts per page)
    • ✅ Category pages included
    • 💬 Posts JSON API
  • 💅 Sass pre-installed and -configured
  • 📝 mdsvex pre-installed—use Svelte components inside Markdown!
    • 🔗 Rehype plugins are included to generate unique heading IDs, for direct linking
  • 📱 Responsive and accessible defaults; includes a “skip to content” link and accessible mobile nav menu
  • 🔄 Page transitions (fancy!)
  • 🔎 Basic SEO for blog posts (strongly recommend checking that out for yourself, though)
  • 📰 RSS feed set up and ready to go (though it could also likely benefit from some optimization); just update src/lib/config.js

Installation

Clone or download this repo, then install the dependencies and run the dev server.

I recommend using these commands:

npx degit https://github.com/josh-collinsworth/sveltekit-blog-starter my-sveltekit-blog
cd my-sveltekit-blog
npm install
npm run dev -- --open

That should get a dev server up and running (assuming you have npm and Node installed already). Any saved changes to components and styles should auto-refresh blazingly fast.

Customization

Be sure to update src/lib/config.js to reflect your site’s domain, preferences, etc. This is where the nav menu can be updated, as well as where details for the RSS feed will be pulled in.

Adding new posts

Adding new posts is as simple as dropping a new .md file into src/lib/posts. It will automatically show up on the site, be added to the posts API, and any category pages.

A few demo Markdown posts are included, and highlight some of the features of this starter. These posts can be updated or removed, but it may be best to use one as a starting point, just for the frontmatter properties.

If you want to use other frontmatter properties in the template (or just modify the layout), make changes in src/routes/blog/[post].svelte.

Note: posts should have a date frontmatter property. This is how they’re sorted by default. There are also other frontmatter properties used to enhance the site experience (like the coverWidth and coverHeight, which are used in the template to reserve space for the image, minimizing cumulative layout shift).

The starter will still work without date properties in your posts, but the sorting won’t be right.

Pagination

Pagination automatically kicks in once you have more posts than the postsPerPage option in src/lib/config.js. This means you won’t see the pagination right away unless you either change postsPerPage to a very low number, or add several more Markdown files to the src/lib/posts folder.

RSS

This starter also includes a basic RSS feed. It’s very minimal, so you may want to tweak it depending on your XML feed needs, but it does work out of the box.

Update the config details in src/lib/config.js to get your site’s unique info correct. (You could also pull this info in other places, or add to it, to keep things consistent, but that’s up to you.)

Sass

By default, all CSS in this starter is global. It’s located in src/lib/assets/scss, and all compiled into the global.scss file (which is then loaded into the global __layout.svelte file) automatically.

I didn’t use component <style> blocks because, while component-based scoped CSS is very nice, it can also be hard to track down and update. Since this is a starter, I felt it was best to keep all the styles together in one place, and let you, the author, decide whether you want to keep them as they are, move to scoped CSS instead, or use a mixture.

To add or remove pages from the site’s navigation menu (in both the header and footer), edit the navItems array in src/lib/config.js. Items there will be automatically added to the main menu in the header and footer, and the mobile nav menu. They’ll also have proper classes and ARIA attributes to show when they’re the current page.

Colors and Fonts

This starter has a default color palette (Credit to coolors.co) and fonts, but you can easily override those here:

Colors: src/lib/assets/scss/_vars.scss

Fonts: src/app.html for the links, _vars.scss for the font names.

Components

This starter includes only a handful of structural components, for the header, footer, site nav, posts lists (since lists of posts are repeated in several locations), and pagination (plus a couple that are actually just SVG icons).

You’re welcome and encouraged to create your own (using them in Markdown is fun!); I just didn’t want to push authors too far in any component direction right off the bat.

Static files

Things that should just live in the site root of the finished site (like a robots.txt file, favicon, or maybe images) should go in the static folder. If you link to them, use the root path (e.g., /images/my.png, not ../static/images/my.png).

(Placeholder images credit Unsplash; photographer names are in the file names.)

Building and deploying

The build command (from package.json) is simply:

npm run build

That should do it on a host like Netlify or Vercel. Or, if you prefer, you can run npm run build to generate the static files, then upload those (they’ll be generated into a build folder).

Use npm run preview after a build to preview the built site.

Further documentation

I assume at least a little bit of knowledge of SvelteKit and/or similar static site generators here, but be sure to read the SvelteKit docs for more info.