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

• 🎉 Fully up-to-date with SvelteKit 2!
• ⚡️ 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 preloading for automatic, fast background preloading of all top-level pages
• ✍️ Markdown support with a pre-configured blog
  • 📑 Pagination included (can customize posts per page)
  • ✅ Category pages included
  • 💬 Posts JSON API
• 📝 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
• 💈 Basic CSS ready to use, customize, or remove! Want to use Sass or Tailwind instead? Just install them! (Directions for Tailwind can be found here.) Prefer to write your own? Delete static/css and add your own links in +layout.svelte.
• ℹ️ Fonts included. (No more built-in Google tracking.)

Quick Start

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

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.

Now all you need to do is:

• Update the src/lib/config.js file
• Drop your Markdown posts into src/lib/posts
• Optionally, customize the styles in static/css

GLHF! Details below. 👇

(Feel free to open an issue if you come across one.)

Customization

Be sure to update src/lib/config.js to reflect your site’s domain, preferences, etc. This is also where the nav menu can be updated.

It’s very important to update this file with the specific details of your site. Info from this file is used in your RSS feed and SEO meta tags, so don’t launch without updating it.

Adding new posts

Adding new posts is as simple as dropping a new .md file into src/lib/posts. New posts 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 demo 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]/+page.svelte.

⚠️ Note: posts should have a date and an excerpt defined in the frontmatter. They’re sorted by date, and use excerpt in page meta tags (for SEO, social sharing, etc.) 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. Similarly, you can have posts without an excerpt, but your SEO/social previews will be sub-optimal.

Also: while there’s no link to it by default, /blog/category exists as an archive of all your post categories.

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.

Note: both the normal /blog feed and the category feeds at /category/[category] are automatically paginated.

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.)

CSS

By default, all CSS in this starter is global vanilla CSS. It’s located in static/css (linked from +layout.svelte).

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.

(Note: previous versions of this starter came with Sass pre-installed. I’ve removed it now because it seems like vanilla CSS is almost entirely as powerful as Sass now anyway, and because it’s probably easier for people who want it to opt in than for those who don’t to opt out.)

Site navigation menus

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

This starter has a default color palette (Credit to coolors.co) but you can easily override those in the CSS. The color variable values can be found in static/css/vars.css.

Fonts

Previously, fonts were loaded from Google Fonts, but now they’re hosted locally, for moderately better performance and a 100% reduction in tracking.

The fonts in question are Atkinson Hyperlegible by the Braille Institute, and Fira Code by Nikita Prokopov. The fonts are open-source; please consider supporting the authors.

The font files themselves are hosted in static/fonts. They are linked from the fonts.css file, and set in typography.css.

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, deploying and hosting

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

npm run build

You can use that as your build command if your repo is connected to a host like Netlify or Vercel, which automatically deploys.

Or, if you prefer, you can run npm run build locally to generate the static files. That will result in a build folder you can upload anywhere a static site can be hosted.

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

Adding Tailwind

The directions for adding Tailwind can be found in the Tailwind docs, here.

The only thing worth noting is: this starter’s existing CSS files won’t be in the Tailwind path after following those steps. You can either just delete them and start from scratch; or, you can copy the CSS into your Tailwind app.css file. (Or, move the CSS files into src/lib, and import each one individually.)

It’s up to you. Just note that Tailwind automatically applies some defaults, so even if you do choose to keep this starter’s default styling, your site might not look the same after installing Tailwind. (Headings, for example, just look like plain text when using Tailwind, unless classes are applied.)

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.

Contributing

I’ve tried my best to make sure this starter is up to date with the latest SvelteKit, but I’m sure improvements can be made. Feel free to visit the repo and submit a pull request, or contact me directly.