Unlock the Power of Gatsby: A Beginner’s Guide to Building Blazing-Fast Websites

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is a free, open-source framework built on React that helps developers create lightning-fast websites and apps using modern web technologies. With features like server-side rendering, code and data splitting, and static progressive web apps (PWAs), Gatsby loads only the critical HTML, CSS, data, and JavaScript, ensuring your site loads as quickly as possible.

Getting Started with Gatsby

To set up a Gatsby app, you’ll need to install the Gatsby CLI globally using Yarn or npm. Once installed, create a new Gatsby site using the Gatsby CLI tool and grab one of the starter projects, such as the Gatsby blog starter. This starter ships with the main Gatsby configuration files you’ll need to get up and running.

npm install -g gatsby-cli
gatsby new my-blog-starter https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog

Understanding GraphQL in Gatsby

GraphQL is a query language that allows you to pull data into your website. Gatsby uses GraphQL as its interface for managing site data. With GraphQL, you can fetch data using either page queries or StaticQuery. Page queries allow you to query data in pages using Gatsby’s graphql tag, while StaticQuery enables components to retrieve data via a GraphQL query.

query {
  allMarkdownRemark {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        frontmatter {
          title
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Integrating TypeScript into Your Gatsby App

To integrate TypeScript into your Gatsby app, you’ll need to install the necessary dependencies, including gatsby-plugin-typescript. This plugin is responsible for type checking and transpiling TypeScript code. Once installed, add the plugin to your gatsby-config.js file and create an eslintrc.js and tsconfig.json file in the root directory of your codebase.

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    `gatsby-plugin-typescript`,
  ],
};

Configuring Your Gatsby App

In your gatsby-config.js file, you can specify information about your site, such as the site title, description, and metadata. You can also customize and extend the default Gatsby settings affecting the browser, Node APIs, and server-side rendering.

module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    title: `My Blog`,
    description: `A blog about web development`,
  },
};

Using GraphQL Queries in Your Gatsby App

To fetch data in your Gatsby app, you can use either page queries or StaticQuery. The 404.js file in the src/pages folder is an example of how to use page queries to fetch data using GraphQL. Meanwhile, the seo.js file in the src/components folder demonstrates how to use StaticQuery to retrieve data via a GraphQL query.

import { graphql } from 'gatsby';

export const query = graphql`
  query {
    site {
      siteMetadata {
        title
      }
    }
  }
`;

TypeScript Interfaces for Props

In TypeScript, interfaces help shape the specifications of an entity. You can define interfaces for props in your components, such as in the bio.tsx, layout.tsx, seo.tsx, 404.tsx, index.tsx, and blog-post.tsx files.

interface BioProps {
  name: string;
  description: string;
}

Putting it All Together

Once you’ve configured your Gatsby app and integrated TypeScript, you can restart the app and check out your blog at localhost:8000. With Gatsby, GraphQL, and TypeScript, you can build blazing-fast websites and apps with ease.

gatsby develop

Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser to see your blog in action.