Static sites are wonderful. I’m a big fan.

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They also have their issues. Namely, static sites either are purely static or the frameworks that generate them completely lose out on true static generation when you just dip your toes in the direction of server routes.

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Astro has been watching the front-end ecosystem and is trying to keep one foot firmly embedded in pure static generation, and the other in a powerful set of server-side functionality.

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With Astro Actions, Astro brings a lot of the power of the server to a site that is almost entirely static. A good example of this sort of functionality is dealing with search. If you have a content-based site that can be purely generated, adding search is either going to be something handled entirely on the front end, via a software-as-a-service solution, or, in other frameworks, converting your entire site to a server-side application.

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With Astro, we can generate most of our site during our build, but have a small bit of server-side code that can handle our search functionality using something like Fuse.js.

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In this demo, we’ll use Fuse to search through a set of personal “bookmarks” that are generated at build time, but return proper results from a server call.

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