Rendering the Pokemon UI: A Guide to GatsbyJS

In this tutorial, we will be using GatsbyJS to create an application that renders a Pokemon UI. GatsbyJS is a powerful static site generator that uses React to build fast websites and applications.

Before we begin, make sure you have Node.js installed on your system. You can download it from the official Node.js website. Once you have Node.js installed, you can install Gatsby CLI by running the following command in your terminal:

npm install -g gatsby-cli

Now, let’s create a new Gatsby project by running the following command:

gatsby new pokemon-ui

cd into the newly created project directory:

cd pokemon-ui

Next, start the development server by running:

gatsby develop

Now that we have our Gatsby project set up, let’s start building our Pokemon UI. We will be using the PokeAPI to fetch Pokemon data. To fetch data from the PokeAPI, we will use the popular axios library. Let’s install axios by running the following command:

npm install axios

Now, create a new file named src/pages/pokemon.js and add the following code:

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';
import axios from 'axios';

const Pokemon = () => {
  const [pokemon, setPokemon] = useState(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    const fetchData = async () => {
      const response = await axios.get('https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/1');
      setPokemon(response.data);
    };

    fetchData();
  }, []);

  if (!pokemon) {
    return <div>Loading...</div>;
  }

  return (
    <div>
      <h1>{pokemon.name}</h1>
      <img src={pokemon.sprites.front_default} alt={pokemon.name} />
    </div>
  );
};

export default Pokemon;

In this code snippet, we are fetching data from the PokeAPI using axios and rendering the name and image of the first Pokemon in the response data. We are using React Hooks to manage the state of the component.

Now, let’s update the src/pages/index.js file to include a link to the Pokemon component. Update the file with the following code:

import React from 'react';
import { Link } from 'gatsby';

const IndexPage = () => (
  <div>
    <h1>Welcome to the Pokemon UI!</h1>
    <Link to="/pokemon">View Pokemon</Link>
  </div>
);

export default IndexPage;

Now, if you navigate to http://localhost:8000 in your browser, you should see a link that says "View Pokemon". Click on the link to navigate to the Pokemon component, where you should see the name and image of the first Pokemon in the response data.

Congratulations! You have successfully created a Pokemon UI using GatsbyJS. Feel free to explore more features of GatsbyJS to enhance your application further.