Astro 7 and Vite 8: What Changes When You Upgrade

Astro 7 started with astro@7.0.0-alpha.0 on 30 April 2026 and became stable with 7.0.0 on 22 June 2026. This page covers what changed and how to move an Astro 6 site across. (It was first written about the alpha; the details below follow the 7.0.0 release notes.)

The two big changes

Vite 8. Astro 7 runs on Vite 8, which bundles with Rolldown, a Rust-based bundler, instead of Rollup. Faster builds are the main promise. The catch is plugins: Vite plugins written against Rollup-specific behaviour may need updates. If you use custom Vite plugins in astro.config.mjs, check their compatibility notes for Vite 8.

A Rust compiler. The Astro compiler that turns .astro files into JavaScript was written in Go and is now replaced by a Rust implementation (@astrojs/compiler-rs), described in the release notes as faster and more reliable. Most sites won’t notice anything but speed. Edge cases in unusual .astro syntax are where to look if a build breaks.

Other changes in 7.0.0 worth checking

From the 7.0.0 release notes:

• @astrojs/db removed: the package is no longer maintained.
• Sätteri is the default Markdown processor. Check custom remark/rehype plugins.
• compressHTML defaults to 'jsx'.
• Advanced routing enabled by default, and some advanced-routing internals are no longer public.
• Route caching is stable: experimental.cache and experimental.routeRules become top-level cache and routeRules.
• Deprecated astro:transitions exports removed.
• experimental.queuedRendering removed: the new rendering engine is now the only one.

Upgrading an Astro 6 site

Do it on a branch:

git switch -c astro7
npx @astrojs/upgrade        # updates astro and official integrations together
npm run build

Then compare against your current production build:

• Does the build finish without new warnings?
• Do pages, sitemaps and RSS feeds produce the same URLs? (diff the list of files in dist/.)
• Do your adapter (Node, Cloudflare and so on) and on-demand routes still work in a preview deployment?

Pin the Astro version in your lockfile and let CI run npm ci, so production never jumps a major version by accident.

What’s Next

• Astro + Cloudflare Pages vs WordPress: €12/Year for a Faster Site: Full walkthrough for deploying Astro to Cloudflare Pages with the official adapter
• SEO in Astro Without Plugins: Sitemaps and Schema: The metadata layer to re-verify after any major-version upgrade
• Self-Hosting Forgejo on Your Homelab: A GitHub-Free Git Server Setup: Run your own CI pipeline so you control when and how upgrades land
• Coolify on Your Homelab: Ditch Vercel and Heroku for Good: Self-hosted push-to-deploy if you would rather not build on Cloudflare