Getting started

Astroid now develops in its own repository

Astroid moved to bowenlabs/astroidjs and is no longer built or released from the Louise Toolkit repository. It still depends on Louise, and that dependency still runs one way, so what follows stays accurate—but for issues, source, and the changelog, go there.

Louise is the unopinionated toolkit: primitives you assemble yourself. Astroid is the opinionated preset on top—a section library, a theme system, and a single typed config that generates the Louise wiring a site would otherwise write by hand.

Astro        →  renderer / router / build
  Louise     →  unopinionated primitives + framework glue   (louise-toolkit)
    Astroid  →  opinions: theme, sections, config, scaffold  (astroidjs)

Dependencies flow one way—astroidjs → louise-toolkit, never the reverse.

Pre-1.0, and moving fast

Both packages are published (astroidjs, create-astroid) but pre-1.0. Breaking changes ship as a minor bump, so pin an exact version if you depend on one.

Which one do I want?

	Louise	Astroid
You already have an Astro app	✅ add it	❌ scaffolds a new one
You want to choose your own schema, routes, auth	✅	❌ it chooses for you
You want a running editable site today	assembly required	one command
You need a page-builder + section library	build it	ships 15 sections

If you’re adding editing to an app you already have, use Louise directly. If you’re starting a brand-new site on Cloudflare, start here.

Scaffold

pnpm create astroid my-site

Every option is prompted for; in a non-TTY each prompt takes its default, so the command is CI-safe. The target directory must be empty.

pnpm create astroid [directory] [options]

  --name <name>         Brand / site name
  --key <slug>          Project key (slug); names the generated bindings
  --archetype <type>    marketing | storefront | wholesale | portfolio
  --color <hex>         Brand color
  --host <domain>       Primary domain, for example, example.com
  --commerce <provider> square | stripe | fourthwall
  --map                 Self-hosted PMTiles/MapLibre location map
  --pwa                 Installable PWA (scoped service worker + manifest)
  --portal              Customer/member portal (a second, isolated auth instance)
  --realtime            Live multi-editor editing (a per-page Durable Object)

You get a working floor, not a blank page: an inline-editable home page, magic-link editor sign-in, the editor drawer wired up, migrations, and a wrangler.jsonc with every binding stubbed.