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rishabhmhjn
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Astro Blog with Nx Monorepo

I had been thinking about migrating my WordPress blog into something more developer-oriented. WordPress is great — battle-tested, popular, and has a plugin for everything — but it’s not built for people like me who want full control over their content and workflow.

✅ My Wishlist

Section titled “✅ My Wishlist”

What I really wanted was a blog system that would let me:

  • ✍️ Write posts in Markdown
  • 🧳 Work comfortably from my tablet (via GitHub Mobile or Codespaces)
  • ⚙️ Build into static pages (fast + SEO-friendly)
  • 📚 Display posts in reverse chronological order like a traditional blog
  • 🚀 Deploy via CI (GitHub Actions) and host on GitHub Pages or similar tooling

🚧 Enter Astro + Starlight

Section titled “🚧 Enter Astro + Starlight”

After evaluating a few static site generators, I chose Astro, using the Starlight Rapide theme. The reasons were simple:

  • Fast static builds
  • Clean, minimal layout
  • Native Markdown support
  • Easy to host and maintain
  • Content collections for typed Markdown posts

🧱 Keeping It Inside a Monorepo

Section titled “🧱 Keeping It Inside a Monorepo”

I already had an Nx workspace (rishabhmhjn-srcs) where I plan to keep all my projects. I added the Astro blog as an app inside apps/rishabhmhjn.com.

Each blog post lives under src/content/blog/, with frontmatter like:

---
title: "My First Post"
pubDate: 2025-07-15
description: "This is the first post on my new Astro blog!"
tags: ["astro", "starter"]
---

This setup makes it super easy to write and commit from anywhere — even on mobile.

🚀 CI/CD with GitHub Actions + Pages

Section titled “🚀 CI/CD with GitHub Actions + Pages”

I created a GitHub Actions workflow that builds the Astro site and deploys to GitHub Pages. The steps are simple:

  1. Install dependencies
  2. Run astro build (wrapped in Nx)
  3. Deploy dist/projects/rishabhmhjn.com using peaceiris/actions-gh-pages

More at .github/workflows/rishabhmhjn.com.yml

I verified my custom subdomain on GitHub by:

  • Adding a TXT record (_github-challenge-)
  • Setting up a CNAME DNS record pointing astro.rishabhmhjn.com to rishabhmhjn.github.io

It now lives at https://astro.rishabhmhjn.com 🚀

✍🏼 Actual part of writing

Section titled “✍🏼 Actual part of writing”

I wanted to be able to perform some level of coding on my tablet and explore tools like codespaces. I am actually writing this blog on my tablet!

Codespaces on tablet

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