Overrides

Astro Editor assumes a “standard” Astro project structure and defaults to some commonly-used frontmatter field names. If your project differs from these defaults, you can override them in the Preferences — either for the whole project or for a single content collection.

Most of these overrides resolve through a three-tier fallback:

1. The collection setting, if you’ve set one
2. otherwise the project setting, if you’ve set one
3. otherwise Astro Editor’s built-in default.

The sections below list every override, its scope, and its default. Where these settings are stored on disk is covered in Advanced Preferences.

Path overrides

These tell Astro Editor where the relevant directories live, relative to the project root.

Setting	Scope	Default	Controls
Content Directory	Project + collection	src/content	Where collections are discovered
Assets Directory	Project + collection	src/assets	Where dragged or inserted images are copied
MDX Components Directory	Project only	src/components/mdx	Where the component builder looks for components

The MDX components directory can only be set per project — it has no collection-level override.

Frontmatter field mappings

These tell Astro Editor which frontmatter field to treat as each special field. They’re configured per collection.

Setting	Default	Controls
Title Field	title	The field used as the file’s title. Must be a string.
Published Date Field	date	The field used to order the file list and shown in that list. Must be of type date.
Description Field	description	The field rendered as the description in the frontmatter panel.
Draft Field	draft	The field used to mark a file as a draft. Must be a boolean.

Image paths

Setting	Scope	Default	Effect
Use Absolute Paths for Images	Project + collection	Off (relative)	When off, inserted image paths are relative to the current file (e.g. ../../assets/image.png); when on, they’re absolute from the project root (e.g. /src/assets/image.png)

This applies to both image frontmatter fields and images dropped into the editor. See Images & Files.

Content links

Setting	Scope	Default	Effect
Link URL Pattern	Collection only	Unset	A template for links the Content Finder inserts. Use {slug}, which is filled from a file’s slug frontmatter, falling back to its id. When unset, links use a relative file path instead.

For example, a pattern of /writing/{slug} turns a link into /writing/my-post.

New files

Setting	Scope	Default	Effect
Default File Type for New Files	Global + project + collection	md	Whether new files are created as Markdown (.md) or MDX (.mdx)

This can be set globally and overridden per-project and collection.