How quickly can I make an Astro DB project? (part 1)

I’ve been meaning to try out Astro DB and I have a little project I need to make for our school, but I don’t have a lot of time. Here’s a real-time live blog of my progress.

Start: I’ve made Astro sited before (this website is one), but never with SSR, Astro DB and not on Vercel¹. It’s been a while since I made a new Astro project so I looked up the docs to find the npm create astro@latest command.

3 minutes: I’ve made a new Astro project. Now looking up how to make turn it in to a server-side-rendered site.

6 minutes: Vercel adapter successfully added. I’m now looking at the sample site using npm run dev. Signing up for Astro DB at https://astro.build/db/.

9 minutes: I have my Astro Studio account now. Trying to add a db to my project with the npx astro add db command recommended in the docs.

18 minutes: I’ve defined my table in db/config.js. Just trying to figure out how to connect it to Astro Studio now. Pushing all the changes so far to my GitHub repo for the project.

26 minutes: I’ve created a new Project in the dashboard of Astro Studio and connected it to my GitHub repo. Will also try and deploy to Vercel while I wait.

32 minutes: The Project is created in Studio, but the DB doesn’t appear to have any tables yet. My first attempt at deploying to Vercel failed because I didn’t add --remote to my deploy command, but after doing that and adding a Studio app token to my Vercel project environment variables, everything is deployed.

After 32 minutes I have a new Project set up, a development DB, a connection with Astro Studio, and a successful deployment with Vercel. I’m pretty happy with that. Tomorrow I will try to get my schema on the hosted DB, and start adding records via a form on my site.

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This has been post no. 14 for #WeblogPoMo2024 and it is what I was interested in today.

Footnotes

1. I’m a Netlify girly. ↩