Astro Quick start guide

Estimated duration: 10 minutes

This guide shows you how to connect Prepr to an Astro project to get data from Prepr CMS. You'll learn how to make a simple blog with Astro and Prepr CMS. By the end of this guide, you'll have a working app that looks like the image below.

Blog site end result

If you want to skip ahead, try out the zero installation demo on Stackblitz (opens in a new tab) or clone the repository on GitHub (opens in a new tab) to run the demo locally.

Prerequisites

You need to have the following setup before you connect your Astro project to Prepr.

Step 1: Create a new Astro project

The instructions below will guide you on how to create an empty Astro project for your blog app.

If you have an existing Astro project, then you can skip this step.

Execute the command below to create an Astro project called prepr-astro. Choose an Empty project and defaults for the remaining options.

npm create astro@latest prepr-astro

When the project is successfully created, go to the prepr-astro folder, the root directory of the project, and execute the commands below to start the project.

cd prepr-astro

npm run dev

You should now be able to view your app on your localhost, for example, http://localhost:3000/.
Open your Astro project with your preferred code editor, for example, Visual Studio Code.
Go to the src/pages folder and update the index.astro file with the following code to display your blog:

./src/pages/index.astro

---
import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro';
---
 
<Layout title="My blog site">
	<h1>
    My blog site
	</h1>
</Layout>

Go to the src folder and create a layouts folder. In this folder, add the HTML components that can be reused by different pages to a file called Layout.astro with the following code:

./src/layouts/Layout.astro

---
export interface Props {
	title: string;
}
 
const { title } = Astro.props;
---
 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<meta charset="UTF-8" />
		<meta name="description" content="Astro description">
		<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
		<link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/favicon.svg" />
		<meta name="generator" content={Astro.generator} />
		<title>{title}</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<slot />
	</body>
</html>

You should now see something like the image below on your localhost.

view component

Step 2: Connect to Prepr

Set up a connection to Prepr to retrieve CMS data with GraphQL. The instructions below show you how to connect to Prepr directly from your project so that you can execute GraphQL queries to request data from the Prepr API.

Create a folder called lib in the src folder. Then, create a file called prepr.js in this folder. Copy the following code to this file to set up the endpoint:

./src/lib/prepr.js

export async function Prepr(query, variables) {
    const response = await fetch(import.meta.env.PREPR_ENDPOINT, {
        method: 'POST',
        headers: {
            'Content-Type': 'application/json'
        },
        body: JSON.stringify({ query, variables }),
    })
    return response
}

We recommend using environment variables to store sensitive information like access tokens. To add environment variables, create a .env file in the root directory of your project and add the API URL as follows:

./.env

PREPR_ENDPOINT=<YOUR-PREPR-API-URL>

Replace the placeholder value <YOUR-PREPR-API-URL> with the API URL of an access token from Prepr. Get this URL by logging into your Prepr account:
a. Go to Settings → Access tokens to view all the access tokens.
b. Copy the API URL value from the GraphQL Production access token to only retrieve published content items.

Use the GraphQL Production API URL to request published content items for your live app and use the GraphQL Preview value to make a preview of unpublished content items for your content editors.
Update the astro config file astro.config.mjs with the code below to use server-side rendering. Check out the Rendering strategies docs for more details.

./astro.config.mjs

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
 
// https://astro.build/config
export default defineConfig({
 
    // Set up SSR
    output: 'server'
});

If your app runs without errors, then the setup above was done correctly. The next step is to fetch content from Prepr using the endpoint that you set up.

Step 3: Fetch multiple articles

Now that your app is connected to Prepr, fetch the blog articles from Prepr.

Add a GraphQL query

Create a queries folder in the src folder that you just created and create a file named get-articles.js.
Add the following query to this file to retrieve all articles:

./src/queries/get-articles.js

const GetArticles = `
query {
    Articles {
        items {
            _id
            _slug
            title
        }
    }
}
`
 
export default GetArticles

You can create and test GraphQL queries using the Apollo explorer (opens in a new tab) from Prepr. Open the API Explorer from the Article content item page in Prepr or the access token page.

If you’re using preloaded demo data in your Prepr CMS environment, as mentioned above in the Prerequisites section, you should have a few published articles as shown in the below image. The query will retrieve the ID, Slug, and Title of each article.

demo articles

In the next step, we'll fetch and process the query response.

Fetch data

Now that the query has been added, fetch the articles from Prepr and display them in the app.

Go to the src/pages folder and update the index.astro file to execute the query and display the list of articles:

./src/pages/index.astro

---
import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro';
import {Prepr} from '../lib/prepr.js';
import GetArticles from '../queries/get-articles.js';
 
const response = await Prepr(GetArticles)
const { data } = await response.json()
const articles = data.Articles
---
 
<Layout title="My blog site">
	<h1>
		My blog site
	</h1>
  <!-- Display the retrieved list of articles -->
	<ul>
		{
			articles.items.map((post) => (
				<li>
					{post.title}
				</li>
			))
		}
	</ul>
</Layout>

Now when you view the website on your localhost, you'll see something like the image below.

articles on site

Step 4: Fetch individual articles

Now that you have the list of articles, add links to them. When a visitor clicks on a link, your app should open a detailed article page automatically. The instructions below show you how to create a route from the main page to the detailed page and how to fetch the article details based on the slug of the article that was clicked.

Add links

First add links to the articles.

Update the index.astro file to include a link on each article title as shown in the code below.

./src/pages/index.astro

---
import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro';
import {Prepr} from '../lib/prepr.js';
import GetArticles from '../queries/get-articles.js';
 
const response = await Prepr(GetArticles)
 
const { data } = await response.json()
 
const articles = data.Articles
---
 
<Layout title="Welcome to Astro.">
	<h1>
		My blog site
	</h1>
	<ul>
		{
			articles.items.map((post) => (
				<li>
           <!-- Add links that reference the article slug -->
					<a href={post._slug}>{post.title}</a>
				</li>
			))
		}
	</ul>
</Layout>

Now when you view the app, each article has its own link. When you click on the link, a new page opens with the slug in the URL, but a Page 404 error is displayed. Continue with the next step to fetch the article details and resolve this error.

Fetch article details

Add another query to fetch a specific article by its slug and make this page visible when clicking on an article.

Create a file called get-article-by-slug.js in the queries folder and add the following query to this file to query a specific article by its slug:

./src/lib/queries/get-article-by-slug.js

const GetArticleBySlug = `
query ($slug: String) {
   Article (slug: $slug) {
     _id
     title
     content {
       __typename
       ... on Text {
         body
         text
       }
       ... on Assets {
         items {
           url
         }
       }
     }
   }
}`
 
export default GetArticleBySlug

Now that the query is added, fetch the individual article by its slug. Fetch the article title and the article content.

The Article content is stored in a Dynamic content field. Check out the GraphQL docs for more details on how to fetch the data within this field.

Go to the src/pages folder and create a file called [...slug].astro file with the following code to execute the query that you just created and display the retrieved article:

./src/pages/[...slug].astro

---
import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro';
import {Prepr} from '../lib/prepr.js';
import GetArticleBySlug from '../queries/get-article-by-slug.js';
 
const { slug } = Astro.params;
 
const response = await Prepr(GetArticleBySlug, {slug})
 
const { data } = await response.json()
 
const article = data.Article
---
<Layout title={article.title}>
    <main>
        <h1>{article.title}</h1>
 
        {
            article.content.map((content) => (
            <div>
 
                {
                    content.__typename === "Assets" &&
                    <img src={content.items[0].url} width="300" height="250"/>
                }
 
                {
                    content.__typename === 'Text' &&
                    <div set:html={content.body}></div>
                }
            </div>
            ))
        }
    </main>
</Layout>

Now, when you view your site, you can click on an article which will direct you to that specific article like in the image below.

Article end result

All done

Congratulations! You have successfully connected an Astro project to Prepr for a simple Blog app.

Next steps

To learn more on how to expand your project, check out the following resources:

Astro Svelte

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