Draft posts in Astro with a published flag

I wanted to write blog posts ahead of time and publish them later. Astro doesn’t have a built-in draft system for Content Collections so I made a simple one with a published flag in frontmatter.

The schema

Add published as an optional boolean that defaults to true in your content config:

// src/content.config.ts
const blog = defineCollection({
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    date: z.coerce.date(),
    slug: z.string(),
    published: z.boolean().optional().default(true),
    // ...
  })
})

Existing posts without the field are published by default. To make a draft just add published: false to the frontmatter.

Filter everywhere

Every place you call getCollection needs to filter out unpublished posts:

const posts = await getCollection('blog', ({data}) => data.published !== false)

That includes your blog index, tag pages, category pages, RSS feed, sitemap, OG image generation — anywhere you list or generate pages from posts. Miss one and the draft leaks into production.

Show drafts in dev

The nice thing is you can still see your drafts locally. In your blog post page, check import.meta.env.DEV:

export async function getStaticPaths() {
  const isDev = import.meta.env.DEV
  const posts = await getCollection('blog', ({data}) => isDev || data.published !== false)
  return posts.map(post => ({
    params: {slug: post.data.slug},
    props: {post}
  }))
}

In dev mode all posts show up. In production builds drafts are excluded. No separate branch, no CMS, just a boolean in the markdown file.

Publishing

When you’re ready just change published: false to true (or remove the line entirely), build and deploy. That’s it.