Adding Markdown Pages

Gatsby can use Markdown files to create pages in your site. You add plugins to read and understand folders with Markdown files and from them create pages automatically.

Here are the steps Gatsby follows for making this happen.

  1. Read files into Gatsby from the filesystem
  2. Transform Markdown to HTML and frontmatter to data
  3. Add a Markdown file
  4. Create a page component for the Markdown files
  5. Create static pages using Gatsby’s Node.js createPage API

Read files into Gatsby from the filesystem

Use the plugin gatsby-source-filesystem to read files.

Install

npm install gatsby-source-filesystem

Add plugin

NOTE: There are two ways to add a plugin in gatsby-config.js. Either you can pass a string with the plugin name or in case you want to include options, pass an object.

Open gatsby-config.js to add the gatsby-source-filesystem plugin. Now pass the object from the next block to the plugins array. By passing an object that includes the key path, you set the file system path.

Completing the above step means that you’ve “sourced” the Markdown files from the filesystem. You can now “transform” the Markdown to HTML and the YAML frontmatter to JSON.

Transform Markdown to HTML and frontmatter to data using gatsby-transformer-remark

You’ll use the plugin gatsby-transformer-remark to recognize files which are Markdown and read their content. The plugin will convert the frontmatter metadata part of your Markdown files as frontmatter and the content part as HTML.

Install transformer plugin

npm install gatsby-transformer-remark

Configure plugin

Add this to gatsby-config.js after the previously added gatsby-source-filesystem.

Add a Markdown file

Create a folder in the /src directory of your Gatsby application called markdown-pages. Now create a Markdown file inside it with the name post-1.md.

Frontmatter for metadata in Markdown files

When you create a Markdown file, you can include a set of key value pairs that can be used to provide additional data relevant to specific pages in the GraphQL data layer. This data is called frontmatter and is denoted by the triple dashes at the start and end of the block. This block will be parsed by gatsby-transformer-remark as frontmatter. The GraphQL API will provide the key value pairs as data in your React components.

What is important in this step is the key pair slug. The value that is assigned to the key slug is used in order to navigate to your post.

Create a page template for the Markdown files

Create a folder in the /src directory of your Gatsby application called templates. Now create a blogTemplate.js inside it with the following content:

Two things are important in the file above:

  1. A GraphQL query is made in the second half of the file to get the Markdown data. Gatsby has automagically given you all the Markdown metadata and HTML in this query’s result.

    Note: To learn more about GraphQL, consider this excellent resource

  2. The result of the query is injected by Gatsby into the Template component as data. markdownRemark is the property that you’ll find has all the details of the Markdown file. You can use that to construct a template for your blog post view. Since it’s a React component, you could style it with any of the recommended styling systems in Gatsby.

Create static pages using Gatsby’s Node.js createPage API

Gatsby exposes a powerful Node.js API, which allows for functionality such as creating dynamic pages. This API is available in the gatsby-node.js file in the root directory of your project, at the same level as gatsby-config.js. Each export found in this file will be run by Gatsby, as detailed in its Node API specification. However, you should only care about one particular API in this instance, createPages.

Use the graphql to query Markdown file data as below. Next, use the createPage action creator to create a page for each of the Markdown files using the blogTemplate.js you created in the previous step.

NOTE: Gatsby calls the createPages API (if present) at build time with injected parameters, actions and graphql.

This should get you started on some basic Markdown functionality in your Gatsby site. You can further customize the frontmatter and the template file to get desired effects!

For more information, have a look in the working example using-markdown-pages. You can find it in the Gatsby examples section.

Other tutorials

Check out tutorials listed on the Awesome Gatsby page for more information on building Gatsby sites with Markdown.

Gatsby Markdown starters

There are also a number of Gatsby starters that come pre-configured to work with Markdown.

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