Choosing Your Gatsby Project’s Architecture

Sam Bhagwat
Sam Bhagwat
February 23rd, 2022
When architecting a professional Gatsby website, you need to choose a number of systems: build & hosting provider, headless CMS, component library, e-commerce, analytics, auth, search, forms, and so on.
In addition, your team probably has a number of workflows involving multiple systems. Setting up content preview involves your CMS, Gatsby, and your hosting provider. Creating CMS-driven landing pages involves your CMS, your React components, and Gatsby.

Architecture = Systems + Workflows

The interaction of systems and workflows is an architecture. Typically, a team lead, or tech lead on a Gatsby project is responsible for the architecture.

Choosing Systems, Optimizing Workflows

Systems and workflows in your architecture can be complex. We’ve written blog posts and docs with best practices for many of them.

Making Architecture Decisions Incrementally

Architectures don’t need to be finalized before the project starts. Sometimes, teams can build projects faster by parallelizing development and architecture.

For example, one team had a senior developer work out the full architecture while the junior developer built components. Another team started by building components as they figured out their CMS and hosting providers.

Sam Bhagwat
Written by
Sam Bhagwat

Gatsby cofounder & chief strategy officer. Programmer, analyst, writer

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