Using Gatsby - The first months

Why?

In former times, I blogged using jekyll, and I had my problems with it:

• Not so easy to understand.
• Markdown was not sufficient for what I wanted to do.
• Strange tooling here or there
• Not a stable deployment process

So I wanted to use something else …

What?

I stumbled over Gatsby in a podcast The Changelog which sounded like it should be worth a try. But how to use it? Then I had to travel for some hours with the train, and I wanted to give it a try. First, it was a nightmare, but after having installed the relevant node projects, if went on smoothly.

Which goals?

I wanted to deploy the final blog with Github Pages, and so I tried first the plugin that said it will do the job. But that did not work for me.

So I used the normal tools (like gatsby build) and added some more jobs to it. In a nutshell, it is the following line: gatsby build --prefix-paths && rm -fr docs && mv public docs

Prefix-paths

See the documentation under https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/path-prefix/ for details. In my case, I did:

• Added line pathPrefix: '/mliebelts-blog' to gatsby-config.js
• Use the additional option --prefix-paths in your production build process.

Using directory docs

If you want to deploy on Github, you have to move your blog into the directory docs. So by deleting the directory first all the time, and then moving the generated directory public to docs, everything works then.

Finally

I faced problems here or there:

• I had problems deploying the production version, when the directory .cache was not cleaned before. So I did that regularly.
• And I had the problem to find all new resources I had to push, so look twice to not see missing documents, images, …

Written by Markus Liebelt who lives and works near Stuttgart in Germany. You should follow him on Twitter, or see his stats on Stackoverflow.