The Great Gatsby

Gatsby is a popular open-source framework for building static websites and web applications. It is based on React, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and uses modern web development tools like webpack and Babel to help you build fast and SEO-friendly websites.

In this tutorial, we will walk through the process of setting up a Gatsby site from scratch, covering key concepts, features, and best practices along the way.

Step 1: Installing Gatsby

To get started with Gatsby, you’ll need to have Node.js and npm installed on your machine. If you don’t have them installed already, you can download them from the official Node.js website.

Once you have Node.js and npm installed, you can create a new Gatsby site by running the following command in your terminal:

npx gatsby new my-gatsby-site

This command will create a new Gatsby site in a directory called my-gatsby-site and install all the necessary dependencies for you.

Step 2: Exploring the Gatsby directory structure

Once the installation process is complete, navigate to the my-gatsby-site directory and take a look at the files and folders that Gatsby has set up for you. Here’s a brief overview of the key files and folders in a typical Gatsby project:

• src: This folder contains all the source code for your Gatsby site, including your React components, pages, and stylesheets.
• pages: This folder contains the pages of your Gatsby site. Each JavaScript or Markdown file in this folder will be automatically transformed into a page by Gatsby.
• gatsby-config.js: This file contains the configuration settings for your Gatsby site, such as the site’s title, description, and plugins.
• gatsby-node.js: This file allows you to programmatically create pages, modify nodes, and customize the GraphQL data layer in your Gatsby site.
• gatsby-browser.js and gatsby-ssr.js: These files allow you to customize the behavior of your Gatsby site in the browser and on the server respectively.

Step 3: Creating pages with Gatsby

One of the main features of Gatsby is its ability to automatically create pages from your source files. To create a new page in your Gatsby site, you can simply create a new JavaScript or Markdown file in the src/pages directory. For example, to create a new page called about.js, you can create a new file called about.js in the src/pages directory with the following content:

import React from 'react';

const AboutPage = () => (
  <div>
    <h1>About Us</h1>
    <p>Welcome to our Gatsby site!</p>
  </div>
);

export default AboutPage;

Once you’ve created the new page, you can access it in your Gatsby site by navigating to http://localhost:8000/about in your web browser.

Step 4: Adding data to your Gatsby site

Gatsby allows you to pull in data from various sources, including local files, APIs, and CMSs, using GraphQL. To add data to your Gatsby site, you can create a new GraphQL query in your React components or pages and use the data returned by the query to render content on your site.

For example, you can create a new GraphQL query in the about.js file to pull in data from a Markdown file like so:

import React from 'react';
import { useStaticQuery, graphql } from 'gatsby';

const AboutPage = () => {
  const data = useStaticQuery(graphql`
    query {
      markdownRemark(frontmatter: { title: { eq: "About Us" } }) {
        frontmatter {
          title
          description
        }
      }
    }
  `);

  return (
    <div>
      <h1>{data.markdownRemark.frontmatter.title}</h1>
      <p>{data.markdownRemark.frontmatter.description}</p>
    </div>
  );
};

export default AboutPage;

Step 5: Styling your Gatsby site

Gatsby allows you to style your site using CSS, CSS-in-JS libraries like Styled Components, or CSS preprocessors like Sass. To add styles to your Gatsby site, you can create a new stylesheet in the src/styles directory and import it into your components or pages.

For example, you can create a new stylesheet called styles.css in the src/styles directory with the following content:

body {
  font-family: 'Arial', sans-serif;
  color: #333;
}

h1 {
  color: #007bff;
}

To import the stylesheet into your about.js component, you can import it like so:

import React from 'react';
import '../styles/styles.css';

const AboutPage = () => (
  <div>
    <h1>About Us</h1>
    <p>Welcome to our Gatsby site!</p>
  </div>
);

export default AboutPage;

Step 6: Optimizing your Gatsby site for performance

Gatsby is known for its fast performance and great SEO capabilities out of the box. However, you can further optimize your Gatsby site for performance by following best practices like lazy-loading images, code-splitting, and caching data.

One of the easiest ways to optimize your Gatsby site for performance is to use plugins like gatsby-plugin-image, gatsby-plugin-sharp, and gatsby-transformer-sharp to automatically optimize and cache images in your site.

You can also use tools like Lighthouse or WebPageTest to measure and improve the performance of your Gatsby site over time.

Step 7: Deploying your Gatsby site

Once you’ve built and optimized your Gatsby site, you can deploy it to a hosting provider of your choice. Gatsby sites can be deployed to various hosting providers like Netlify, Vercel, and AWS S3, among others.

To deploy your Gatsby site to Netlify, for example, you can use the Netlify CLI or connect your GitHub repository to Netlify and set up continuous deployment.

To deploy your Gatsby site to Vercel, you can use the Vercel CLI or connect your GitHub repository to Vercel and set up continuous deployment.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we walked through the process of setting up a Gatsby site from scratch, covering key concepts, features, and best practices along the way. We learned how to install Gatsby, create pages, add data, style our site, optimize it for performance, and deploy it to a hosting provider. Gatsby is a powerful framework that makes it easy to build fast and SEO-friendly websites, and we hope this tutorial has helped you get started with Gatsby and explore its capabilities further.