Understanding Content Collections in Astro

Content Collections are one of Astro’s most powerful features for managing content. They provide type safety, validation, and a clean API for querying your content.

What Are Content Collections?

A content collection is a group of related content entries (like blog posts) that share a common structure. Astro validates your content against a schema you define.

Defining a Collection

Create a content.config.ts file in your src directory:

import { defineCollection } from "astro:content";
import { glob } from "astro/loaders";
import { z } from "astro/zod";

const blog = defineCollection({
  loader: glob({ pattern: "**/*.md", base: "./src/data/blog" }),
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    description: z.string(),
    pubDate: z.coerce.date(),
  }),
});

export const collections = { blog };

Querying Collections

Use getCollection() to fetch all entries:

import { getCollection } from "astro:content";

const posts = await getCollection("blog");

Benefits

• Type Safety: Full TypeScript support for your content
• Validation: Catch errors at build time
• Performance: Optimized for large content libraries
• Flexibility: Works with Markdown, MDX, JSON, and more

Content Collections make managing large content libraries a breeze!