Astro 7.4 adds build timings, parallel prerendering and split build/runtime image services

Victoria Shinder16 October 2026, 14:023 min read

The Astro team published astro 7.4.0 on 15 October 2026. It is a minor release with ten new capabilities, two of them experimental, and a set of fixes. One change affects every project: the minimum supported Node.js version is now 22.22.0 (#18277), which the release notes describe as the latest Node.js 22 release supported by StackBlitz, in line with Astro's Node.js support policy.

Finding slow builds. A new --timings flag for astro build prints a summary once the build finishes (#17894). The notes say the aim is to tell whether time goes to an integration, a Markdown processor plugin, image processing or syntax highlighting, and to compare build times before and after a change.

Parallel prerendering (experimental). With experimental.parallelPrerender: true, astro build renders static pages on several CPU cores instead of one (#17932). By default Astro uses all available cores but one; each worker adds memory use, so the notes suggest setting workers to a lower number if a build runs out of memory or does not get faster. Each worker renders as many pages at once as build.concurrency allows.

Two image services. image.service now accepts a separate build and runtime service (#18177). The build service optimises images on prerendered pages and is also used in development; the runtime service handles images on on-demand rendered pages and the image endpoint of the deployed site. The release's example pairs Sharp at build time with an image CDN at runtime. For integration authors, config.image.service keeps the shape the user wrote, so entrypoint and config are undefined when both services are set and the integration has to read the runtime property. Custom prerenderers can now report which images a prerendered page uses; returning a plain array from getStaticPaths() or a plain Response from render() still works but is deprecated, and images on such pages are not generated.

Redirect and 404 pages. Static sites cannot send a Location header, so Astro writes a small HTML page with a meta http-equiv="refresh" tag for each redirect. Its markup, wording and delay were fixed until now. Behind experimental.redirectPage, a project can provide src/pages/3xx.astro, which Astro renders once per redirect with from, to, status and delay as props (#18015). A new notFound() handler for astro/fetch and astro/hono renders the custom 404 page, including a prerendered 404.astro, in custom entrypoints such as a Hono app used directly as a Cloudflare worker (#18265); without it, unmatched routes return an empty 404.

Errors that no longer pass silently. Two fixes change build results. With a custom src/fetch.ts and an adapter that prerenders in its own runtime, such as @astrojs/cloudflare, a page that threw during prerendering used to be written as an empty HTML file while the build succeeded; the build now fails with the underlying error (#18355). And the glob() loader no longer swallows rendering errors during content sync, which had let astro build exit with code 0 when a remark or rehype plugin threw (#18353).

Also in the release. Font providers get an optional getFontProperties() callback, which Astro uses to warn about weights or styles a font family does not offer; it will be required in Astro 8 (#17830). Integrations can control where client, server and prerender output is written (#18313).

Source: withastro/astro, release "astro@7.4.0" — https://github.com/withastro/astro/releases/tag/astro%407.4.0