Why shipyard?

With established tools like Docusaurus and Astro Starlight already available, why create another page builder?

Quick Answer

shipyard exists because:

Docusaurus is powerful but heavy (SPA, React-only) and hard to extend with custom content types
Starlight is lean but couples docs functionality too tightly—you can’t use just the styling and navigation
shipyard gives you composable building blocks on Astro, with easy migration in and out

Learn More

Topic	Description
Comparison with Other Tools	Detailed look at Docusaurus and Starlight—what they do well and where they fall short
The shipyard Philosophy	How shipyard approaches composability, styling, and migration
Sustainability & Production Readiness	Is shipyard production-ready? Who maintains it? The AI experiment

When to Use shipyard

shipyard is ideal when you want:

A content-focused site on Astro without starting from scratch
The flexibility to add custom content types beyond docs and blogs
Clean separation between docs, blog, and other site sections
A lean, static site without JavaScript bloat
A well-documented component library (DaisyUI) you can extend
Low-risk adoption—migrate in minutes, migrate out just as easily

When to Use Something Else

Docusaurus – If you need versioned docs, an extensive plugin ecosystem, and don’t need custom content types. Good choice if long-term corporate backing matters to you.
Starlight – If you only need documentation and want tight Astro integration with minimal configuration.
Plain Astro – If you want complete control and don’t mind building everything from scratch.

About the Name

Astro leans into the space theme—users are “astronauts,” projects are “spaceships” ready to “launch.” We’re playing along.

A shipyard is where you build ships. Not just one ship, but many. It’s a station—a mothership, if you will—designed to efficiently produce vessels that go out on their own missions.

That’s the idea behind this project. shipyard is for people who frequently need to spin up new websites. Instead of starting from scratch each time, you have a well-equipped station where you can quickly assemble your next ship and send it off into the cosmos.

Build a site. Launch it. Build another. That’s the shipyard workflow.

By the way: it’s always “shipyard” in lowercase, even at the start of a sentence.

shipyard exists because content sites shouldn’t require complex frameworks or compromise on flexibility.