Reviving an Old Repo — Migrating from Ember to Astro

astroembermigrationbun

My GitHub Pages site — deckyfx.github.io — was last touched in 2016. It was an Ember.js app, and it had been broken for years. Every time I opened it I just closed the tab and moved on.

This time I didn’t.

What was there

The repo was a full Ember CLI project. bower.json, ember-cli-build.js, .bowerrc, the works. Nothing ran. Node version was wrong, Bower was already dead, and even if I got it running it would’ve been a blank page from a framework nobody ships anymore.

It wasn’t worth fixing. It was worth replacing.

Why Astro

I wanted something that would just work for a personal profile + blog. No backend, no CMS, no database. Markdown files, a build step, and a static output I can drop on Cloudflare Pages.

Astro fits that perfectly:

  • Zero JS by default — ships no JavaScript unless you ask for it
  • Content Collections — built-in Markdown support with typed frontmatter
  • Fast builds — especially with Bun as the runtime
  • No framework lock-in — I can add React, Vue, or Svelte components if I ever need them

The migration

The migration was basically a wipe and rebuild. Nothing from the old Ember app was worth keeping — not the templates, not the styles, not the config. I created a new branch, deleted everything except .git/ and LICENSE, and ran:

bun create astro@latest .

Tailwind went in next:

bunx astro add tailwind

Then content collections, a layout, the homepage, blog listing, and individual post pages. The whole thing took one session.

Stack choices

Bun over Node — faster installs, faster dev server startup, and I’m already using Bun for everything else. No reason to reach for Node.

Tailwind v4 — the new version uses @import "tailwindcss" in CSS instead of a config file. Much cleaner.

@fontsource over Google Fonts CDN — fonts get bundled into the static output by Vite. No external network request on page load, no privacy concerns, works offline.

lucide-astro for icons — tree-shaken inline SVGs. Zero runtime JavaScript.

Hosting

The new site lives on Cloudflare Pages. Free tier, unlimited requests, automatic deploys on push to master. The old GitHub Pages URL (deckyfx.github.io) has a custom domain set to decky.win so it auto-redirects.

What’s next

The site is sparse intentionally. I’d rather have a clean foundation I actually maintain than a feature-rich thing I abandon again. Blog posts when I have something worth writing. Projects page when I have screenshots worth showing.

Eight years late, but it’s done.