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Astro Digital Garden

Last modified time

With BrainDB

  1. Install BrainDB
  2. Then you can access modification date, like this 
    const doc = (await getBrainDb().documents({ slug }))[0];
    doc.updatedAt();

With Starlight

Starlight already has this feature, but the value is not exposed in the content collection. For example, if you set:

astro.config.mjs
export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [
    starlight({
      lastUpdated: true,
    }),
  ],
});

You would see Last updated: on the page, but at the same time, page.data.lastUpdated would be undefined.

With Remark plugin

  1. Create remark plugin

    remark-modified-time.mjs
    import { execSync } from "child_process";
    

    export function remarkModifiedTime() {
      return function (tree, file) {
        const filepath = file.history[0];
        const result = execSync(
          `git log -1 --pretty="format:%cI" "${filepath}"`
        );
        file.data.astro.frontmatter.lastUpdated = result.toString();
      };
    }

  2. Configure Astro

    astro.config.mjs
    import { remarkModifiedTime } from "./remark-modified-time.mjs";
    

    export default defineConfig({
      markdown: {
        remarkPlugins: [remarkModifiedTime],
      },
    });

  3. You may need to adjust content schema

    src/content/config.ts
    import { z, defineCollection } from "astro:content";
    

    const blog = defineCollection({
      schema: z.object({
        lastUpdated: z.string().transform((str) => new Date(str)),
      }),
    });

But the value is accessible only after render:

const { remarkPluginFrontmatter } = await page.render();
console.log(remarkPluginFrontmatter.lastUpdated);

Based on: Astro recipes ↗

Tips

Github actions

If you build your site with Github Actions, you need to use fetch-depth: 0

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0

Further improvements

Use the last modification date (for content pages) in: