Building with Components
Requirements
To use Gatsby, you will need a basic understanding of React components.
The official tutorial is a good place to start.
Why React components?
React’s component architecture simplifies building large websites by encouraging modularity, reusabilty, and clear abstraction. 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.
Thinking in React is a good resource for learning how to structure applications with React.
How does Gatsby use React Components?
Everything in Gatsby is built using components.
A basic directory structure of a project might look like this:
.
├── gatsby-config.js
├── package.json
└── src
├── html.jsx
├── pages
│ ├── index.jsx
│ └── posts
│ ├── 01-01-2017
│ │ └── index.md
│ ├── 01-02-2017
│ │ └── index.md
│ └── 01-03-2017
│ └── index.md
├── templates
│ └── post.jsx
│
└── layouts
└── index.jsx
Page components
Components under src/pages
become pages automatically with paths based on
their file name. For example src/pages/index.jsx
is mapped to yoursite.com
and src/pages/about.jsx
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.jsx
import React, { Component } from "react";
class AboutPage extends Component {
render() {
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.jsx
is an example of a page component. It queries GraphQL
for markdown data and then renders the page using this data.
See part four of the tutorial for a detailed introduction to programmatically creating pages.
Example:
import React from "react";
class BlogPostTemplate extends React.Component {
render() {
const post = this.props.data.markdownRemark;
return (
<div>
<h1>{post.frontmatter.title}</h1>
<div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: post.html }} />
</div>
);
}
}
export default BlogPostTemplate;
export const pageQuery = graphql`
query BlogPostBySlug($slug: String!) {
markdownRemark(fields: { slug: { eq: $slug } }) {
html
frontmatter {
title
}
}
}
`;
Layout components
src/layouts/index.jsx
(optional) wraps page components. You can use it for
portions of pages that are shared across pages like headers and footers.
Example:
import React from "react";
import Navigation from "../components/Navigation/Navigation.jsx";
export default class Template extends React.Component {
render() {
return <Navigation>{this.props.children()}</Navigation>;
}
}
HTML component
src/html.jsx
is responsible for everything other than where Gatsby lives in
the <body />
.
In this file you can modify the <head>
metadata, 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:
import 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);
}
}
export default class HTML extends React.Component {
render() {
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"
/>
{this.props.headComponents}
<link rel="shortcut icon" href={favicon} />
{css}
</head>
<body>
<div
id="___gatsby"
dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: this.props.body }}
/>
{this.props.postBodyComponents}
</body>
</html>
);
}
}
These are examples of the different ways React components are used in Gatsby sites. To see full working examples, check out the examples directory in the Gatsby repo.