What is Gatsby js

To build a blog today has become even more easy with the new JAM Stack (JavaScript, API, and Markup). JAM Stack stands for A modern architecture - Create fast and secure sites and dynamic apps with JavaScript, APIs, and prerendered Markup, served without web servers.

Gatsby is a static site generator that is built on ReactJS. In its simplest definition, a static website is a group of HTML pages, which does not pull any data from a database when a viewer visits it. A static site looks the same for every visitor. Static sites are faster to load too, as the server sends the same response to every visitor. However, you can not customize content for visitors. Since Gatsby builds on top of React, you get all the benefits of React such as its performance, components, JSX, React library ecosystem and a large community. Gatsby Documentation is also very well written so you should not have any problems. If you don't know React js, you can buy great React books from Amazon on the links below:

Or if you prefer to learn to React by building an app with step by step tutorial, you can start with this article: Create React App From Scratch Series

For many static websites, you will need to use external data sources during the build process. Gatsby provides support for many forms of data, including CMSs like WordPress, APIs, and Markdown. To access this data, Gatsby uses GraphQL.

Gatsby js Schema

If you know GraphQL, accessing data from Markdown using Gatsby feels easy. If GraphQL is new to you, it does add yet another thing to learn, however, the documentation on using GraphQL with Gatsby has a lot of information.

Note: GraphQL is a query language.

Building a Blog With Gatsby js

To create a blog with gatsby js, we need to do a couple of steps. Let's see in the example below.

Install the Gatsby CLI

npm install -g gatsby-cli

Create a new site

gatsby new gatsby-site

Change directories into site folder

cd gatsby-site

Start the development server

gatsby develop

After the four steps, your gatsby site will be ready, you can access the gatsby development environment at localhost:8000 by default. You can edit JavaScript pages in the src/pages and the changes will be reloaded automatically in the browser.

Create a production build

gatsby build

With the build command, Gatsby will perform production build for your site, which in other words means generating static HTML pages.

Serve the production build locally

gatsby serve

Lastly, with the shell command, Gatsby will start local HTML server for testing your build site

Gatsby project structure

With the Gatsby site installed you will get the default project structure, which is very simple with a couple of important config files to remember.

|-- /.cache |-- /plugins |-- /public |-- /src |-- /pages |-- /templates |-- html.js |-- /static |-- gatsby-config.js |-- gatsby-node.js |-- gatsby-ssr.js |-- gatsby-browser.js

Gatsby js project structure

There are four important files for gatsby site:

gatsby-config.js - configure options for Gatsby with metadata like title, description, etc.

- configure options for Gatsby with metadata like title, description, etc. gatsby-node.js - Gatsby Node.js API for customizing the default settings about the build process.

- Gatsby Node.js API for customizing the default settings about the build process. gatsby-browser.js - Gatsby browser API for customizing the default settings for the browser.

- Gatsby browser API for customizing the default settings for the browser. gatsby-ssr.js - Gatsby server-side rendering API for customizing the settings affecting server-side rendering.

Creating pages automatically

Gatsby will create pages automatically from the React components in src/pages into pages with URL addresses. For example, components index.js and about.js would automatically create pages for index page (/) and about page (/about).

Gatsby js components

Gatsby js components are just React components, if you have basic React knowledge you would not have problems understanding them, let's see how does React component looks like in the next example.

import React from "react" const AboutPage = () => ( <main> <h1>About the Author</h1> <p>Welcome to my Gatsby site.</p> </main> ) export default AboutPage

Gatsby js component

In the example above we have a React functional component build with JSX, on the top we are importing the React, which after we have the about page with the HTML like structure inside, and at the end we are exporting the React component.

JSX is a syntax extension to JavaScript for producing the React components.

Markdown

Gatsby can use markdown files or .md for creating pages in your web site. The markdown pages should be added to the pages folder, for example /pages/posts . The naming of the markdown files is best to be with date-url or just the url with the extension .md at the end.

--- path: /how-to-build-a-blog-with-gatsby-and-netlify/ title: How To Build A Blog With Gatsby and Netlify image: /assets/gatsby-cover.jpg author: Aleksandar Vasilevski category: Gatsby tags: '#gatsby #netlify #cms #blog #jam #javascript #react' date: 2019-09-19T11:00:00.619Z --- //Here we just add the content in markdown format

Markdown file example

Netlify CMS

With Netlify CMS you can add content more easy without manually editing the markdown files. To start Sourcing from Netlify CMS you need to install the NPM package for the Netlify CMS.

npm install netlify-cms

After the installing of the package, you will need to add the plugin to the gatsby-config.js , if the file is not there feel free to create it.

module.exports = { plugins: [`gatsby-plugin-netlify-cms`], }

Finally, you’ll need to add a configuration file. The plugin you just installed will take care of creating the Netlify CMS app and outputting it, so you’ll want to put the configuration file in that same directory.

backend: name: test-repo media_folder: static/assets public_folder: assets collections: - name: blog label: Blog folder: blog create: true fields: - { name: path, label: Path } - { name: date, label: Date, widget: datetime } - { name: title, label: Title } - { name: body, label: Body, widget: markdown }

Configuration file located in static/admin/config.yml

Saving to a Git Repo

To save content in a Git repo, the repo should be hosted on some service like GitHub and you will need to authenticate the service so the Netlify CMS can make changes to the content. To enable basic GitHub authentication you will need:

Follow the authentication provider setup steps in the Netlify docs. Add the following lines of code to your Netlify CMS config.yml file: backend: name: github repo: owner-name/repo-name # Path to your GitHub repository

Note: You can add content manually by pushing the pages to your Git repo without any CMS. To do that just add the markdown pages to your pages folder.

Deploying Gatsby site to Netlify

To deploy your Gatsby js site to Netlify, (You can find the full example here: How to Deploy A Website to Netlify) for static file hosting.

Pros of using Netlify static file hosting:

Cloud functions.

Domain managment (with SSL).

Form submissions

a/b testing

Clean user interface

Once you’ve wired up Netlify to your repo, each push to your GitHub repository, automatically builds your website, according to the static site generator you’re using, and deploys it to production. The best part about Netlify is that it’s free. If you plan on building a small web site or blog it’s unlikely you’ll need to pay for anything.

Conclusion

In the previous years, you would need to use technologies like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc, and with that, you would be needed to pay for server costs every month. While WordPress is still very good in terms of popularity, community, ease of use of the whole platform, JAM Stack or in our case Gatsby and Netlify CMS in its native form provides some excellent features as well. If you find this article helpful please share it and thanks for reading.