Astro 7.4 has landed, and this release focuses on making builds easier to inspect and adapters easier to reason about. The headline addition is a new --timings flag that reports where your build spends its time, turning build performance into something you can measure rather than guess at.
Here is what shipped in this version:
- A
--timingsflag that prints a breakdown of where the build spends its time, so slow stages are visible in the terminal. - Separate build and runtime image services, so the service used while generating the site is no longer forced to be the same one used when serving it.
- A
notFound()handler for custom entrypoints, letting adapters and custom servers produce their own 404 responses. - Experimental parallel prerendering, which can prerender pages concurrently instead of sequentially.
- Experimental custom redirect pages, allowing redirects to be rendered through a page rather than only emitted as static redirect rules.
The notFound() addition matters most for anyone maintaining an adapter or a custom server entrypoint. Previously there was no first-class hook for the not-found case; now custom entrypoints can supply one directly. The split image services address a similar integration gap: with the two services decoupled, a build-time optimizer and a runtime image handler no longer have to be the same implementation, which is useful for server adapters and on-demand rendering.
For day-to-day development, the --timings flag is the immediate win. Running a build with timings gives a concrete record of which phase dominates, making it far easier to justify or verify an optimisation. The two experimental features, parallel prerendering and custom redirect pages, point at the same direction: faster large-site builds and more control over routing behaviour that was previously fixed.
As with any release, the experimental flags are opt-in and should be tested before relying on them in production. Check the release notes for the exact configuration options and any caveats tied to your adapter before upgrading.