Astro 6.0 brings new astro dev, built-in Fonts API, Live Content Collections, and CSP API

Astro 6.0 has been released as the latest version of this JavaScript web framework. A key change is environment unification: by using Vite’s new Environment API, the astro dev command can now run a custom runtime environment. This means the development server and build pipeline now share code paths, aligning the local development setup with production.

Astro 6 adds a built-in Fonts API, simplifying font configuration from local sources or third-party providers like Google Fonts and Fontsource. Following this, Live Content Collections are now stable, allowing request-time content fetching within Astro’s unified content layer. The Content Security Policy API also reaches stable status, offering developers CSP configuration for both static and dynamic pages on traditional and serverless architectures.

Major core dependency updates include Vite 7, Shiki 4, and Zod 4. Astro 6 now requires Node 22, ending support for Node 18 and 20. Alongside these changes, the release introduces an experimental Rust-based compiler set to replace the previous Go-based .astro compiler. Astro 6 presents a new experimental rendering strategy that early benchmarks suggest can be up to twice as fast as before. Additionally, an experimental route caching API offers platform-agnostic caching for server-rendered responses following web standards.