How to Start a New Site with a Theme

The quickest way to get started using a Gatsby theme is to use a starter that’s configured to use the theme.

For example, gatsby-starter-blog-theme is a theme starter for the gatsby-theme-blog package.

A regular Gatsby starter creates a new Gatsby site that is preconfigured for a particular use case. The resulting site effectively forks off the starter — after it’s created, the site maintains no connection to the starter.

A Gatsby theme starter creates a new Gatsby site that installs and configures one or more Gatsby themes. When a starter installs a theme, it maintains the connection to that theme as a standalone npm package.

Installing the Gatsby blog theme starter is the same process as a regular Gatsby starter:

What does a theme starter do?

The starter for the official Gatsby blog theme does the following:

1. The starter installs the theme and configures it

When you use a starter that’s built with a theme, you will often see that you’re initially presented with a lighter weight gatsby-config.js. Themes start doing their magic when installed via the plugins array:

2. The starter scaffolds out example blog posts

Once you’ve made some edits, run gatsby develop to start a development server and view your changes in a browser.

Updating a theme

To pull in the latest updates of your theme you can update the gatsby-theme-blog version in your site’s package.json.

You can do this by running the install of the theme package again: npm install gatsby-theme-blog.