Wrong starter template description (and typo)

[ohansemmanuel]

What?

The following is a rather ambiguous (slightly misleading) sentence as it gives the impression you can take any public Github astro project and start a new project based on it (i.e., copy the files as a "template")

You can also start a new astro project based on an existing GitHub repostory by passing a --template argument to the create astro command.

In reality, this does not seem to be the case.

How?

it appears (as I suspected), the creation from an "existing Github repository" command/description only works with existing starter templates

e.g.,

✅ this works:

npm create astro@latest -- --template satnaing/astro-paper

❌ this does not work:

npm create astro@latest -- --template ohansemmanuel/astrojs-ditch-the-runtime-react 

Suggestion

If the assumption above is correct i.e., this works for existing templates, then it's perhaps worth reconsidering rewording the sentence to:

You can also start a new astro project based on an existing starter template GitHub repostory repository by passing a --template argument to the create astro command.

[delucis]

Hmm. Interesting I’m not actually clear what the difference between those two repos is that makes one fail, I think theoretically they should both work. It might be the branch name? Noticing that the one that fails uses master instead of main for the primary branch. Wonder if create astro specifically expects to copy from main.

[ohansemmanuel]

@delucis you're right. create astro seems to specifically copy from main.

I added a main branch and this worked:

Is this worth documenting? Or perhaps create astro tweaked to copy from the default branch?

[delucis]

Let me check with the core team. Maybe we can use the default branch in create astro. Feels like a bug to me, but if we can’t fix it, at that point it might make sense to document.

[delucis]

As a side note, it looks like you can also specify the branch name after a # in the command, e.g.

npm create astro@latest -- --template ohansemmanuel/astrojs-ditch-the-runtime-react#master

It looks like this could be a limitation of the underlying tool Astro uses: https://github.com/unjs/giget/

When parsing the template location, they look for #<branch-name-or-commit-ref> and otherwise default to main: https://github.com/unjs/giget/blob/4c55d188222c4e129e51e4894c0797a4bd7b2149/src/_utils.ts#L35-L44

[ohansemmanuel]

It looks like this could be a limitation of the underlying tool Astro uses

That makes sense. It does work with the branch name after a #.

Thanks for the input @delucis - Please feel free to either close this issue or consider a possible next step: documenting this limitation (with a small note after the instructions)

[delucis]

Opened #2413 to address this. Thanks for raising this issue @ohansemmanuel!