gatsby-gitbook-starter

Kick off your project with this starter to create a powerful/flexible docs/tutorial web apps.

🔥 Features

• Write using Markdown / MDX
• GitBook style theme
• Syntax Highlighting using Prism [Bonus: Code diff highlighting]
• Search Integration with Algolia
• Progressive Web App, Works Offline
• Google Analytics Integration
• Automatically generated sidebar navigation, table of contents, previous/next
• Dark Mode toggle
• Edit on Github
• Fully customisable
• Rich embeds and live code editor using MDX
• Easy deployment: Deploy on Netlify / Now.sh / Docker

🚀 Quickstart

Get started by running the following commands:

$ npm install
$ npm start

Visit http://localhost:8000/ to view the app.

🔧 Configure

Write markdown files in content folder.

Open config.js for templating variables. Broadly configuration is available for gatsby, header, sidebar and siteMetadata.

• gatsby config for global configuration like

  • pathPrefix - Gatsby Path Prefix
  • siteUrl - Gatsby Site URL
  • gaTrackingId - Google Analytics Tracking ID

• header config for site header configuration like

  • title - The title that appears on the top left
  • githubUrl - The Github URL for the docs website
  • helpUrl - Help URL for pointing to resources
  • tweetText - Tweet text
  • links - Links on the top right
  • search - Enable search and configure Algolia

• sidebar config for navigation links configuration

  • forcedNavOrder for left sidebar navigation order. It should be in the format "/"
  • frontLine - whether to show a front line at the beginning of a nested menu.(Collapsing capability would be turned of if this option is set to true)
  • links - Links on the bottom left of the sidebar
  • ignoreIndex - Set this to true if the index.md file shouldn't appear on the left sidebar navigation. Typically this can be used for landing pages.

• siteMetadata config for website related configuration

  • title - Title of the website
  • description - Description of the website
  • ogImage - Social Media share og:image tag
  • docsLocation - The Github URL for Edit on Github

• For sub nesting in left sidebar, create a folder with the same name as the top level .md filename and the sub navigation is auto-generated. The sub navigation is alphabetically ordered.

Algolia Configuration

To setup Algolia, go to config.js and update the search object to look like the one below:

	"search": {
		"enabled": true,
		"indexName": "MY_INDEX_NAME",
		"algoliaAppId": process.env.GATSBY_ALGOLIA_APP_ID,
		"algoliaSearchKey": process.env.GATSBY_ALGOLIA_SEARCH_KEY,
		"algoliaAdminKey": process.env.ALGOLIA_ADMIN_KEY
	},

Values for Algolia App ID, Search Key, and Admin Key can be obtained from Algolia Dashboard with the right set of permissions. Replace MY_INDEX_NAME with the Algolia Index name of your choice. To build the Algolia index, you need to run npm run build which will do a gatsby build along with content indexing in Algolia.

Progressive Web App, Offline

To enable PWA, go to config.js and update the pwa object to look like the one below:

   "pwa": {
        "enabled": false, // disabling this will also remove the existing service worker.
        "manifest": {
            "name": "Gatsby Gitbook Starter",
            "short_name": "GitbookStarter",
            "start_url": "/",
            "background_color": "#6b37bf",
            "theme_color": "#6b37bf",
            "display": "standalone",
            "crossOrigin": "use-credentials",
            icons: [
                {
                    src: "src/pwa-512.png",
                    sizes: `512x512`,
                    type: `image/png`,
                },
            ],
        },
    }

Live Code Editor

To render react components for live editing, add the react-live=true to the code section. For example:

<button>Edit my text</button>

In the above code, just add javascript react-live=true after the triple quote ``` to start rendering react components that can be edited by users.

🤖 SEO friendly

This is a static site and comes with all the SEO benefits. Configure meta tags like title and description for each markdown file using MDX Frontmatter

---
title: "Title of the page"
metaTitle: "Meta Title Tag for this page"
metaDescription: "Meta Description Tag for this page"
---

Canonical URLs are generated automatically.

☁️ Deploy