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Adding Markdown Pages |
Gatsby can use markdown files to create pages in your site. You add plugins to read and understand folders with markdown files and from them create pages automatically.
Here's the steps Gatsby follows for making this happen.
- Read files into Gatsby from the filesystem
- Transform markdown to HTML and frontmatter to data
- Create a page component for the markdown files
- Programmatically create pages using Gatsby's Node.js
createPage
API
Use the plugin gatsby-source-filesystem
to read files.
npm install --save gatsby-source-filesystem
Now open gatsby-config.js
to add this plugin to the plugin array.
To add a plugin, add either a string (the plugin name) or to pass options, an object.
For gatsby-source-filesystem
we pass an object so we can set the file system path:
plugins: [
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
options: {
path: `${__dirname}/path/to/markdown/files`,
name: "markdown-pages",
},
},
]
Now that we've "sourced" the markdown files from the filesystem, we can now "transform" the markdown to HTML and the YAML frontmatter to JSON.
We'll use the plugin gatsby-transformer-remark
to recognise files which are markdown and read its content. It will convert the frontmatter metadata part of your markdown file as frontmatter
and the content part as HTML.
npm install --save gatsby-transformer-remark
Add this to gatsby-config.js
after the previously added gatsby-source-filesystem
.
plugins: [
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
options: {
path: `${__dirname}/path/to/markdown/files`,
name: "markdown-pages",
},
},
`gatsby-transformer-remark`,
]
When you create a Markdown file, at the top of the file, add the block below. You can have different key value pairs that are relevant to your website. This block will be parsed by gatsby-transformer-remark
as frontmatter
. The GraphQL API will provide this data in our React components.
---
path: "/blog/my-first-post"
date: "2017-11-07"
title: "My first blog post"
---
Create a folder in the /src
directory of your Gatsby application called templates
.
Now create a blogTemplate.js
inside it with the following content.
import React from "react"
import { graphql } from "gatsby"
export default function Template({
data, // this prop will be injected by the GraphQL query below.
}) {
const { markdownRemark } = data // data.markdownRemark holds our post data
const { frontmatter, html } = markdownRemark
return (
<div className="blog-post-container">
<div className="blog-post">
<h1>{frontmatter.title}</h1>
<h2>{frontmatter.date}</h2>
<div
className="blog-post-content"
dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: html }}
/>
</div>
</div>
)
}
export const pageQuery = graphql`
query($path: String!) {
markdownRemark(frontmatter: { path: { eq: $path } }) {
html
frontmatter {
date(formatString: "MMMM DD, YYYY")
path
title
}
}
}
`
Two things are important in the file above.
- A GraphQL query is made in the second half of the file to get the Markdown data. Gatsby has automagically given you all the Markdown metadata and HTML in this query's result. Note: To learn more about GraphQL, consider this excellent resource
- The result of the query is injected by Gatsby into the
Template
component asdata
.markdownRemark
is the property that we find has all the details of the Markdown file. We can use that to construct a template for our blogpost view. Since it's a React component, you could style it with any of the recommended styling systems in Gatsby.
Gatsby exposes a powerful Node.js API, which allows for functionality such as creating dynamic pages. This API is available in the gatsby-node.js
file in the root directory of your project, at the same level as gatsby-config.js
. Each export found in this file will be run by Gatsby, as detailed in its Node API specification. However, we only care about one particular API in this instance, createPages
.
Gatsby calls the createPages
API (if present) at build time with injected parameters, actions
and graphql
. Use the graphql
to query Markdown file data as below. Next use createPage
action creator to create a page for each of the Markdown files using the blogTemplate.js
we created in the previous step.
const path = require("path")
exports.createPages = ({ actions, graphql }) => {
const { createPage } = actions
const blogPostTemplate = path.resolve(`src/templates/blogTemplate.js`)
return graphql(`
{
allMarkdownRemark(
sort: { order: DESC, fields: [frontmatter___date] }
limit: 1000
) {
edges {
node {
frontmatter {
path
}
}
}
}
}
`).then(result => {
if (result.errors) {
return Promise.reject(result.errors)
}
result.data.allMarkdownRemark.edges.forEach(({ node }) => {
createPage({
path: node.frontmatter.path,
component: blogPostTemplate,
context: {}, // additional data can be passed via context
})
})
})
}
This should get you started on some basic markdown power in your Gatsby site. You can further customise the frontmatter
and the template file to get desired effects!
Check out tutorials listed on the Awesome Gatsby page for more looks at building Gatsby sites with markdown.
There are a number of Gatsby starters that come preconfigured to work with markdown.