What it is
Astro Rocket is my own free, open-source theme, built on Astro 7 and Tailwind CSS v4. It isn’t a boilerplate you spend a week wiring up — it’s a complete foundation built around 57 designed components that all speak one design language, so whatever you build with them looks right.
I made it for the people I know best: designers, freelancers, and developers who want to build a beautiful website without starting from zero. It’s MIT-licensed, up on GitHub, and listed on the official Astro themes directory. The full thing runs live at astrorocket.dev — and it grew out of the site you’re reading this on, Hans Martens Dev. It scores 100 on all four Lighthouse categories on the live demo — see the theme page for the full picture.
From a fork to a theme of its own
Astro Rocket started as a fork of Velocity by Southwell Media — a well-engineered Astro boilerplate with a serious design system underneath it, and full credit to them for that foundation. On top of it I built my own website, Hans Martens Dev — and somewhere along the way, what I was building outgrew being one website. So I made a version of it with demo content and released it as a theme of its own — my site wasn’t even finished at that point, and from then on the two evolved side by side. Today Astro Rocket is a complete starter built around its component library, where every building block — pages, blog, search, SEO, i18n, twelve colour themes — is designed, tested, and documented so you can build on it with confidence. What it looks like today, feature by feature, lives on the theme page.
Built in the open
The part I’m proudest of isn’t a feature. Since the release, developers around the world have picked the theme up — 80 stars and 40 forks so far — and they steer where it goes: users request enhancements through GitHub issues, we discuss the right solution together, and improvements ship within days. The table of contents, the blog comments, the independent footer menu, the full i18n — all of it exists because someone asked for it in public and got it.
Everything about that process is readable by anyone: the request, the discussion, the release. That issue tracker is the most honest portfolio I have.
What building a theme proves
Building for thousands of unknown users is a different discipline from building for one. Every change has to work across twelve colour themes, in light and dark mode, on sites I will never see. New features ship opt-in and off by default, so nobody’s existing site breaks. Everything needs documentation, because there’s no me sitting next to the person using it.
That bar — accessibility, careful releases, documentation — is the same bar every client project gets. The theme isn’t a side project next to my client work; it’s the standard for it.
Where it’s going
Astro Rocket keeps evolving in the open, and a second, premium theme — Astro Rocket Pro — is in the making. Everything about the free theme lives on the theme page: the features, the live demo, and the GitHub repo. If it saves you a week of setup, a star is the nicest way to say thanks. And if you’d rather have a site like this built for you — that’s my day job.