Orbit MD

Getting started

Overview

Orbit MD lets non-technical editors change your site’s content — the Markdown and data files in its git repository — through a form-based UI. An Astro site’s content collections work with no setup; a site built with another generator (Gatsby, Next.js, …) describes its content in a short content map. Saving puts changes on a preview site; publishing puts them on the live site. Every page shows whether it’s live; editors ask to publish, an approver publishes in Orbit with no trip to GitHub, and your branch protection on GitHub decides who can approve. See Branches & publishing and Setting up your GitHub repository.

Orbit MD open on a site, showing the content collections in the sidebar
Orbit open on a site — collections in the sidebar, ready to edit.

These docs are for the developer or site owner setting a repo up so Orbit can open, understand, and edit it. Your editors don’t need any of this — they open the site and start editing.

The two requirements

Orbit treats a repo as editable only when both are true:

  1. astro is a dependency in package.json, and
  2. A content config file exists (see Astro versions for the exact path per version).

If either is missing, Orbit won’t clone it — you’ll see “not an editable Astro site”. This belt-and-braces check keeps editors from opening repos Orbit can’t actually help with.