What's New in Astro, March 2026: A Quiet Month, a Fresh Starlight
March brought no Astro framework release. The news was Starlight 0.38 — the official docs package updated for Astro 6 with cleaner headers and CJK fonts.
March was a quiet month for Astro: no framework release. The movement happened one layer out, in the packages and themes built on the 6.0 core, and the clearest signal was a fresh Starlight build.
What shipped
The month's release is Starlight 0.38, Astro's official package for documentation sites. It brings Starlight in line with Astro 6 and adds two visible refinements: cleaner header link styling and improved CJK font rendering. For a docs site already on Starlight, 0.38 is the version that gets you onto the new major and picks up both fixes in the same step.
Astro 6 compatibility is the load-bearing change. A theme tracks the framework closely, so a major bump on the core side needs a matching theme release before a docs project can move forward; 0.38 is it. The header link work tidies how navigation renders in the site header, the most-clicked surface on a docs site. The CJK improvement matters for docs serving Chinese, Japanese, or Korean readers, where Latin-only defaults tend to miss the spacing and glyph concerns those scripts carry.
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Ecosystem after 6.0
The wider story is the ecosystem catching up to the Astro 6.0 launch . A major release resets the plumbing, and the surrounding packages spend the following weeks shipping compatible versions; Starlight 0.38 marks how far that work has come against Astro 6's full feature set .
The next jump, Starlight 0.39 , continues it. The first thing teams check before moving to a new Astro version is whether their dependencies already support it, and each compatible release lowers the cost of running astro dev against 6.0 — tracked across our ongoing Astro coverage .
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