starfederation/datastar

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4988 stars · 211 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Datastar is a lightweight hypermedia framework for building reactive web applications using declarative data-* attributes in HTML, with a single ~12 KiB script. Backends in any language drive the frontend by sending HTML fragments or server-sent events (SSE), with official SDKs available.

Use cases

• build reactive web apps without writing frontend JavaScript
• stream server-sent events to patch the DOM from the backend
• add frontend reactivity to a server-rendered site
• build real-time collaborative web applications
• replace a heavy SPA framework with a hypermedia approach
• bind form inputs to reactive signals with data attributes

When to choose

• you want server-driven state management with minimal client-side JavaScript
• your backend is in a language without a rich SPA ecosystem and you want SDK support
• you prefer hypermedia/HTML-over-the-wire architectures like HTMX but want built-in reactivity
• you need a tiny (~12 KiB) dependency for interactive UIs

When to avoid

• you need a large ecosystem of components, routing, and tooling like React or Vue
• your app requires complex offline-first or heavy client-side state
• you need fine-grained control over the client bundle or framework internals

Facets

framework · maturity active

web-framework ssr state-management templating frontend-framework web-development frontend backend cross-platform browser hypermedia server-driven-ui sse declarative-attributes htmx-alternative reactive-signals web-server nodejs

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="starfederation/datastar")