Astro 7.0 brings Vite 8, performance boost, advanced routing, route caching & AI features

Astro 7.0 debuts as a major update to the open source web framework for content-focused websites. This version upgrades its build system to Vite 8, which now utilizes Rolldown, a unified Rust-based JavaScript bundler that delivers 10 to 30 times faster build performance compared to Rollup, without breaking plugin compatibility.

Beyond tooling, Astro 7 makes substantial speed advances by translating core build steps and the .astro component compiler into Rust. The generation process is also accelerated by adopting a queued rendering strategy. Following its experimental introduction, this queued rendering engine is now the default and has been stabilized, consistently improving render speed by about 2.4 times compared to past releases.

Building on Astro’s pipeline improvements, default Markdown and MDX file processing now uses Sätteri, a Rust-driven content processor. While performance is a key focus, developer workflow also expands: developers gain full control of Astro’s request pipeline with src/fetch.ts, mirroring standard fetch handler patterns common on Cloudflare Workers and similar platforms. Route caching, previously experimental, is now a stable feature with a unified API for caching directives and early support for Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare DNS cache providers.

Astro 7 also introduces agent-friendly features: astro dev --background enables managed background processes and JSON logging is now available and configurable for all users.