Edit .astro files in the browser, with nothing added to your repo

No. The plugin is compiled into the PortBay app, written out to PortBay's own data directory, and handed to Astro through a generated astro.config.mjs that imports and spreads your real one. Nothing is added to your repo: uninstall PortBay and package.json, node_modules and astro.config are byte-for-byte what they were. There is no package on npm for this and there never will be, because nothing needs to serve it.

Astro vendors Vite rather than exposing it, and ignores a root vite.config entirely. That was measured rather than assumed: a scratch minimal Astro project carried the same logging plugin twice, once in a root vite.config.ts and once under astro.config's vite.plugins, and only the astro.config one ever ran. A generated Vite config would point Astro at a file it never reads, so the Astro lane registers under astro.config and passes --config as a path relative to your project root, which is the spelling Astro's flag expects.

Not through the visual editor's source mapping. Astro pages, layouts and components in .astro are stamped; .mdx is explicitly refused because its top level is Markdown rather than markup, and a coordinate placed into prose would be wrong. Plain .md is not stamped for the same reason. In practice you edit the template that renders the content — the layout, the page, the component — rather than the prose body, which is what your existing content workflow already handles well.

Both, on this lane. .astro is a markup-first format, so a <Card /> tag carries its own coordinate alongside the host elements around it. That means an element rendered by one of your components still traces back to the line where you used it. This is a real difference from the .jsx and .tsx lane, where component usages are deliberately not stamped because a capitalised tag there can also be a TypeScript generic parameter list.

React, Svelte and Vue islands are stamped by extension, the same as anywhere else. .svelte and .vue islands are markup-first and get the full treatment including component usages. .jsx and .tsx islands get their host elements stamped but not their component usages, so markup produced by a UI library you did not author carries no coordinate. Everything you wrote yourself in an island still maps to its own line.

No. The plugin declares apply: 'serve', so it is loaded for the dev server and never for astro build. There is also nothing to leave behind in your source, because the attribute is added while a file is served rather than written into it — the difference from editors that insert their own id attributes into your components and expect you to strip them before shipping.

PortBay's visual editor is a Pro feature, still in early access behind an opt-in toggle in Settings, and it is not compiled into the open-source build. It also refuses to run while a project is shared over a public tunnel — stop the share first — and the edit bar is limited to local .test hosts. Everything else on this page, including running your Astro dev server on a real .test domain with trusted HTTPS, is in the free app.

Yes — Astro is one of the four formats where that structural edit is supported, alongside JSX, Svelte and Vue. The element's authored span moves out of the page into a new component file, an import is added to the page's script region, and the span it left behind becomes a tag. One refusal is deliberate and named rather than silent: a span carrying a template expression is refused, because a value that was a page local would not exist in the new file and the splice would leave you with a project that no longer builds.