Starlight is a documentation theme built on top of Astro that provides a full-featured, accessible, and performant documentation website framework with minimal configuration. It solves the challenge of building documentation sites that are fast by default by leveraging Astro's zero-JavaScript architecture, shipping static HTML with no client-side JavaScript unless interactive components are explicitly added. Starlight combines the content-focused philosophy of Astro with documentation-specific features to deliver sites that load instantly and score perfectly on performance benchmarks.
Starlight features automatic navigation from file structure, built-in search powered by Pagefind, internationalization with RTL language support, syntax highlighting via Expressive Code with features like line highlighting, diffs, and file headers, dark and light mode with automatic OS preference detection, and automatic OpenGraph image generation. It supports Markdown and MDX content, integrates Astro's component islands for adding interactive elements from React, Vue, Svelte, or other frameworks, and provides built-in components like tabs, cards, and asides for enriching documentation pages.
Starlight is ideal for documentation teams and open-source maintainers who prioritize performance, accessibility, and internationalization. It integrates with any hosting platform that supports static sites including Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare Pages. Starlight is particularly attractive for projects that want framework-agnostic documentation — because it runs on Astro, it can incorporate interactive components from any UI framework while maintaining excellent core web vitals scores that purely client-side documentation frameworks struggle to achieve.