2024-05-22 · Astro

Handle form submissions with Astro Actions

Build a validated contact form that works without JavaScript and upgrades gracefully when it loads.

Introduction

A step-by-step guide to defining server actions, validating input with Zod, and wiring a plain HTML form to them. You get progressive enhancement for free instead of rebuilding your form inside a client framework.

Field notes

A few patterns we kept seeing while puttering around Astro problems:

  • The simple version survived every refactor; the clever version didn’t.
  • Documentation written during the work aged far better than documentation written after.
  • The second time a problem shows up, it is already a pattern — name it.

A checklist you can steal

  • The failure is reproducible with one command.
  • The fix has a test that fails without it.
  • Someone other than the author has run it on their machine.

Closing

Write the short version future-you will actually read. That is the whole trick.