Building with Components

To use Gatsby, you will need a basic understanding of React components.

The is a good place to start.

Why React components?

React’s component architecture simplifies building large websites by encouraging modularity, reusability, and clear abstractions. React has a large ecosystem of open source components, tutorials, and tooling that can be used seamlessly for building sites with Gatsby. Gatsby is built to behave almost exactly like a normal React application.

The following model shows how data from a source can be queried by GraphQL for use inside components in the process of building a Gatsby site:ContentBuildDataViewAppsrc/pages/homepage.js

export ({ data }) => (
  <div>
    <h1>{data.site.title}</h1>
    {data.site.description}
  </div>
)

Your components can pull in whatever data they need from any source in the data layer.

How does Gatsby use React Components?

Everything in Gatsby is built using components.

A basic directory structure of a project might look like this:

Copycopy code to clipboard.├── gatsby-config.js├── package.json└── src    ├── html.js    ├── pages    │   ├── index.js    │   └── posts    │       ├── 01-01-2017    │       │   └── index.md    │       ├── 01-02-2017    │       │   └── index.md    │       └── 01-03-2017    │           └── index.md    ├── templates        └── post.js

Page components

Components under src/pages become pages automatically with paths based on their file name. For example src/pages/index.js is mapped to yoursite.com and src/pages/about.js becomes yoursite.com/about/. Every .js or .jsx file in the pages directory must resolve to either a string or react component, otherwise your build will fail.

Example:src/pages/about.js

Copysrc/pages/about.js: copy code to clipboardimport React from "react"function AboutPage(props) {  return (    <div className="about-container">      <p>About me.</p>    </div>  )}export default AboutPage

Page template components

You can programmatically create pages using “page template components”. All pages are React components but very often these components are just wrappers around data from files or other sources.

src/templates/post.js is an example of a page component. It queries GraphQL for markdown data and then renders the page using this data.

Example:src/templates/post.js

Copysrc/templates/post.js: copy code to clipboardimport React from "react"import { graphql } from "gatsby"function BlogPostTemplate(props) {  const post = props.data.markdownRemark  return (    <div>      <h1>{post.frontmatter.title}</h1>      <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: post.html }} />    </div>  )}export default BlogPostTemplateexport const pageQuery = graphql`  query($slug: String!) {    markdownRemark(fields: { slug: { eq: $slug } }) {      html      frontmatter {        title      }    }  }`

HTML component

src/html.js is responsible for everything other than where Gatsby lives in the <body />.

In this file, you can modify the <head> metadata and general structure of the document and add external links.

Typically you should omit this from your site as the default html.js file will suffice. If you need more control over server rendering, then it’s valuable to have an html.js.

Example:src/html.js

Copysrc/html.js: copy code to clipboardimport React from "react"import favicon from "./favicon.png"let inlinedStyles = ""if (process.env.NODE_ENV === "production") {  try {    inlinedStyles = require("!raw-loader!../public/styles.css")  } catch (e) {    console.log(e)  }}function HTML(props) {  let css  if (process.env.NODE_ENV === "production") {    css = (      <style        id="gatsby-inlined-css"        dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: inlinedStyles }}      />    )  }  return (    <html lang="en">      <head>        <meta charSet="utf-8" />        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />        {props.headComponents}        <link rel="icon" href={favicon} />        {css}      </head>      <body>        <div id="___gatsby" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: props.body }} />        {props.postBodyComponents}      </body>    </html>  )}

Non-page components

PreviousUntitled NextPlugins, Themes, & Starters

Last updated 3 years ago

Was this helpful?

Building with Components