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gatsby-source-contentful

Table of contents

Install

npm install gatsby-source-contentful gatsby-plugin-image

Setup Instructions

To get setup quickly with a new site and have Netlify do the heavy lifting, deploy a new Gatsby Contentful site with just a few clicks on netlify.com.

How to use

First, you need a way to pass environment variables to the build process, so secrets and other secured data aren’t committed to source control. We recommend using dotenv which will then expose environment variables. Read more about dotenv and using environment variables here. Then we can use these environment variables and configure our plugin.

Restrictions and limitations

This plugin has several limitations, please be aware of these:

  1. At the moment, fields that do not have at least one populated instance will not be created in the GraphQL schema. This can break your site when field values get removed. You may workaround with an extra content entry with all fields filled out.
  2. When using reference fields, be aware that this source plugin will automatically create the reverse reference. You do not need to create references on both content types.
  3. When working with environments, your access token has to have access to your desired environment and the master environment.
  4. Using the preview functionality might result in broken content over time, as syncing data on preview is not officially supported by Contentful. Make sure to regularly clean your cache when using Contentful’s preview API.
  5. The following content type names are not allowed: entity, reference
  6. The following field names are restricted and will be prefixed: children, contentful_id, fields, id, internal, parent,
  7. The Plugin has a dependency on gatsby-plugin-image which itself has dependencies. Check Displaying responsive image with gatsby-plugin-image to determine which additional plugins you’ll need to install.

Using Delivery API

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_space_id`,
        // Learn about environment variables: https://gatsby.dev/env-vars
        accessToken: process.env.CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
      },
    },
    `gatsby-plugin-image`,
  ],
}

Using Preview API

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_space_id`,
        // Learn about environment variables: https://gatsby.dev/env-vars
        accessToken: process.env.CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
        host: `preview.contentful.com`,
      },
    },
    `gatsby-plugin-image`,
  ],
}

Offline

If you don’t have internet connection you can add export GATSBY_CONTENTFUL_OFFLINE=true to tell the plugin to fallback to the cached data, if there is any.

Configuration options

spaceId [string][required]

Contentful space ID

accessToken [string][required]

Contentful delivery API key, when using the Preview API use your Preview API key

host [string][optional] [default: 'cdn.contentful.com']

The base host for all the API requests, by default it’s 'cdn.contentful.com', if you want to use the Preview API set it to 'preview.contentful.com'. You can use your own host for debugging/testing purposes as long as you respect the same Contentful JSON structure.

environment [string][optional] [default: ‘master’]

The environment to pull the content from, for more info on environments check out this Guide.

downloadLocal [boolean][optional] [default: false]

Downloads and caches ContentfulAsset’s to the local filesystem. Allows you to query a ContentfulAsset’s localFile field, which is not linked to Contentful’s CDN. See Download assets for static distribution for more information on when and how to use this feature.

localeFilter [function][optional] [default: () => true]

Possibility to limit how many locales/nodes are created in GraphQL. This can limit the memory usage by reducing the amount of nodes created. Useful if you have a large space in Contentful and only want to get the data from one selected locale.

For example, to filter locales on only germany localeFilter: locale => locale.code === 'de-DE'

List of locales and their codes can be found in Contentful app -> Settings -> Locales

forceFullSync [boolean][optional] [default: false]

Prevents the use of sync tokens when accessing the Contentful API.

proxy [object][optional] [default: undefined]

Axios proxy configuration. See the axios request config documentation for further information about the supported values.

useNameForId [boolean][optional] [default: true]

Use the content’s name when generating the GraphQL schema e.g. a content type called [Component] Navigation bar will be named contentfulComponentNavigationBar.

When set to false, the content’s internal ID will be used instead e.g. a content type with the ID navigationBar will be called contentfulNavigationBar.

Using the ID is a much more stable property to work with as it will change less often. However, in some scenarios, content types’ IDs will be auto-generated (e.g. when creating a new content type without specifying an ID) which means the name in the GraphQL schema will be something like contentfulC6XwpTaSiiI2Ak2Ww0oi6qa. This won’t change and will still function perfectly as a valid field name but it is obviously pretty ugly to work with.

If you are confident your content types will have natural-language IDs (e.g. blogPost), then you should set this option to false. If you are unable to ensure this, then you should leave this option set to true (the default).

pageLimit [number][optional] [default: 1000]

Number of entries to retrieve from Contentful at a time. Due to some technical limitations, the response payload should not be greater than 7MB when pulling content from Contentful. If you encounter this issue you can set this param to a lower number than 100, e.g 50.

assetDownloadWorkers [number][optional] [default: 50]

Number of workers to use when downloading Contentful assets. Due to technical limitations, opening too many concurrent requests can cause stalled downloads. If you encounter this issue you can set this param to a lower number than 50, e.g 25.

contentfulClientConfig [object][optional] [default: {}]

Additional config which will get passed to Contentfuls JS SDK.

Use this with caution, you might override values this plugin does set for you to connect to Contentful.

enableTags [boolean][optional] [default: false]

Enable the new tags feature. This will disallow the content type name tags till the next major version of this plugin.

Learn how to use them at the Contentful Tags section.

contentTypeFilter [function][optional] [default: () => true]

Possibility to limit how many contentType/nodes are created in GraphQL. This can limit the memory usage by reducing the amount of nodes created. Useful if you have a large space in Contentful and only want to get the data from certain content types.

For example, to exclude content types starting with “page” contentTypeFilter: contentType => !contentType.sys.id.startsWith('page')

typePrefix [string][optional] [default: Contentful]

Prefix for the type names created in GraphQL. This can be used to avoid conflicts with other plugins, or if you want more than one instance of this plugin in your project. For example, if you set this to Blog, the type names will be BlogAsset and allBlogAsset.

How to query for nodes

Two standard node types are available from Contentful: Asset and ContentType.

Asset nodes will be created in your site’s GraphQL schema under contentfulAsset and allContentfulAsset.

ContentType nodes are a little different - their exact name depends on what you called them in your Contentful data models. The nodes will be created in your site’s GraphQL schema under contentful${entryTypeName} and allContentful${entryTypeName}.

In all cases querying for nodes like contentfulX will return a single node, and nodes like allContentfulX will return all nodes of that type.

Query for all nodes

You might query for all of a type of node:

{
  allContentfulAsset {
    nodes {
      contentful_id
      title
      description
    }
  }
}

You might do this in your gatsby-node.js using Gatsby’s createPages Node API.

Query for a single node

To query for a single image asset with the title 'foo' and a width of 1600px:

export const assetQuery = graphql`
  {
    contentfulAsset(title: { eq: "foo" }) {
      contentful_id
      title
      description
      file {
        fileName
        url
        contentType
        details {
          size
          image {
            height
            width
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
`

To query for a single CaseStudy node with the short text properties title and subtitle:

  {
    contentfulCaseStudy(filter: { title: { eq: 'bar' } })  {
      title
      subtitle
    }
  }

You might query for a single node inside a component in your src/components folder, using Gatsby’s StaticQuery component.

A note about LongText fields

On Contentful, a “Long text” field uses Markdown by default. The field is exposed as an object, while the raw Markdown is exposed as a child node.

{
  contentfulCaseStudy {
    body {
      body
    }
  }
}

Unless the text is Markdown-free, you cannot use the returned value directly. In order to handle the Markdown content, you must use a transformer plugin such as gatsby-transformer-remark. The transformer will create a childMarkdownRemark on the “Long text” field and expose the generated html as a child node:

{
  contentfulCaseStudy {
    body {
      childMarkdownRemark {
        html
      }
    }
  }
}

You can then insert the returned HTML inline in your JSX:

<div
  className="body"
  dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{
    __html: data.contentfulCaseStudy.body.childMarkdownRemark.html,
  }}
/>

Duplicated entries

When Contentful pulls the data, all localizations will be pulled. Therefore, if you have a localization active, it will duplicate the entries. Narrow the search by filtering the query with node_locale filter:

{
  allContentfulCaseStudy(filter: { node_locale: { eq: "en-US" } }) {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        slug
        title
        subtitle
        body {
          body
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Query for Assets in ContentType nodes

More typically your Asset nodes will be mixed inside of your ContentType nodes, so you’ll query them together. All the same formatting rules for Asset and ContentType nodes apply.

To get all the CaseStudy nodes with ShortText fields id, slug, title, subtitle, LongText field body and heroImage asset field, we use allContentful${entryTypeName} to return all instances of that ContentType:

{
  allContentfulCaseStudy {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        slug
        title
        subtitle
        body {
          body
        }
        heroImage {
          title
          description
          gatsbyImageData(layout: CONSTRAINED)
          # Further below in this doc you can learn how to use these response images
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

More on Queries with Contentful and Gatsby

It is strongly recommended that you take a look at how data flows in a real Contentful and Gatsby application to fully understand how the queries, Node.js functions and React components all come together. Check out the example site at using-contentful.gatsbyjs.org.

Displaying responsive image with gatsby-plugin-image

To use it:

  1. Install the required plugins:
npm install gatsby-plugin-image gatsby-plugin-sharp
  1. Add the plugins to your gatsby-config.js:
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    `gatsby-plugin-sharp`,
    `gatsby-plugin-image`,
    // ...etc
  ],
}
  1. You can then query for image data using the new gatsbyImageData resolver:
{
  allContentfulBlogPost {
    nodes {
      heroImage {
        gatsbyImageData(layout: FULL_WIDTH)
      }
    }
  }
}
  1. Your query will return a dynamic image. Check the documentation of gatsby-plugin-image to learn how to render it on your website.

Check the Reference Guide of gatsby-plugin-image to get a deeper insight on how this works.

Building images on the fly via useContentfulImage

With useContentfulImage and the URL to the image on the Contentful Image API you can create dynamic images on the fly:

import { GatsbyImage } from "gatsby-plugin-image"
import * as React from "react"
import { useContentfulImage } from "gatsby-source-contentful/hooks"

const MyComponent = () => {
  const dynamicImage = useContentfulImage({
    image: {
      url: "//images.ctfassets.net/k8iqpp6u0ior/3BSI9CgDdAn1JchXmY5IJi/f97a2185b3395591b98008647ad6fd3c/camylla-battani-AoqgGAqrLpU-unsplash.jpg",
      width: 2000,
      height: 1000,
    },
  })

  return <GatsbyImage image={dynamicImage} />
}

On-the-fly image options:

This hook accepts the same parameters as the gatsbyImageData field in your GraphQL queries. They are automatically translated to the proper Contentful Image API parameters.

Here are the most relevant ones:

Contentful Tags

You need to set the enableTags flag to true to use this new feature.

List available tags

This example lists all available tags. The sorting is optional.

query TagsQuery {
  allContentfulTag(sort: { fields: contentful_id }) {
    nodes {
      name
      contentful_id
    }
  }
}

Filter content by tags

This filters content entries that are tagged with the numberInteger tag.

query FilterByTagsQuery {
  allContentfulNumber(
    sort: { fields: contentful_id }
    filter: {
      metadata: {
        tags: { elemMatch: { contentful_id: { eq: "numberInteger" } } }
      }
    }
  ) {
    nodes {
      title
      integer
    }
  }
}

Contentful Rich Text

Rich Text feature is supported in this source plugin, you can use the following query to get the JSON output:

Note: In our example Content Model the field containing the Rich Text data is called bodyRichText. Make sure to use your field name within the Query instead of bodyRichText

Query Rich Text content and references

query pageQuery($id: String!) {
  contentfulBlogPost(id: { eq: $id }) {
    title
    slug
    # This is the rich text field, the name depends on your field configuration in Contentful
    bodyRichText {
      raw
      references {
        ... on ContentfulAsset {
          # You'll need to query contentful_id in each reference
          contentful_id
          __typename
          fixed(width: 1600) {
            width
            height
            src
            srcSet
          }
        }
        ... on ContentfulBlogPost {
          contentful_id
          __typename
          title
          slug
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Rendering

import { BLOCKS, MARKS } from "@contentful/rich-text-types"
import { renderRichText } from "gatsby-source-contentful/rich-text"

const Bold = ({ children }) => <span className="bold">{children}</span>
const Text = ({ children }) => <p className="align-center">{children}</p>

const options = {
  renderMark: {
    [MARKS.BOLD]: text => <Bold>{text}</Bold>,
  },
  renderNode: {
    [BLOCKS.PARAGRAPH]: (node, children) => <Text>{children}</Text>,
    [BLOCKS.EMBEDDED_ASSET]: node => {
      return (
        <>
          <h2>Embedded Asset</h2>
          <pre>
            <code>{JSON.stringify(node, null, 2)}</code>
          </pre>
        </>
      )
    },
  },
}

function BlogPostTemplate({ data }) {
  const { bodyRichText } = data.contentfulBlogPost

  return <div>{bodyRichText && renderRichText(bodyRichText, options)}</div>
}

Note: The contentful_id and __typename fields must be queried on rich-text references in order for the renderNode to receive the correct data.

Embedding an image in a Rich Text field

Import

import { renderRichText } from "gatsby-source-contentful/rich-text"

GraphQL

mainContent {
  raw
  references {
    ... on ContentfulAsset {
      contentful_id
      __typename
      gatsbyImageData
    }
  }
}

Options

const options = {
  renderNode: {
    "embedded-asset-block": node => {
      const { gatsbyImageData } = node.data.target
      if (!gatsbyImageData) {
        // asset is not an image
        return null
      }
      return <GatsbyImage image={gatsbyImageData} />
    },
  },
}

Render

<article>
  {blogPost.mainContent && renderRichText(blogPost.mainContent, options)}
</article>

Check out the examples at @contentful/rich-text-react-renderer.

Download assets for static distribution

When you set downloadLocal: true in your config, the plugin will download and cache Contentful assets to the local filesystem.

There are two main reasons you might want to use this option:

  • Avoiding the extra network handshake required to the Contentful CDN for images hosted there
  • Gain more control over how images are processed or rendered (ie, providing AVIF with gatsby-plugin-image)

The default setting for this feature is false, as there are certain tradeoffs for using this feature:

  • All assets in your Contentful space will be downloaded during builds
  • Your build times and build output size will increase
  • Bandwidth going through your CDN will increase (since images are no longer being served from the Contentful CDN)
  • You will have to change how you query images and which image fragments you use.

Enable the feature with the downloadLocal: true option.

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_space_id`,
        // Learn about environment variables: https://gatsby.app/env-vars
        accessToken: process.env.CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
        downloadLocal: true,
      },
    },
  ],
}

Updating Queries for downloadLocal

When using the downloadLocal setting, you’ll need to update your codebase to be working with the locally downloaded images, rather than the default Contentful Nodes. Query a ContentfulAsset’s localFile field in GraphQL to gain access to the common fields of the gatsby-source-filesystem File node. This is not a Contentful node, so usage for gatsby-plugin-image is different:

query MyQuery {
  # Example is for a `ContentType` with a `ContentfulAsset` field
  # You could also query an asset directly via
  # `allContentfulAsset { edges{ node { } } }`
  # or `contentfulAsset(contentful_id: { eq: "contentful_id here" } ) { }`
  contentfulMyContentType {
    myContentfulAssetField {
      # Query for locally stored file(e.g. An image) - `File` node
      localFile {
        # Use `gatsby-plugin-image` to create the image data
        childImageSharp {
          gatsbyImageData(formats: AVIF)
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Note: This feature downloads any file from a ContentfulAsset node that gatsby-source-contentful provides. They are all copied over from ./cache/gatsby-source-filesystem/ to the sites build location ./public/static/.

For any troubleshooting related to this feature, first try clearing your ./cache/ directory. gatsby-source-contentful will acquire fresh data, and all ContentfulAssets will be downloaded and cached again.

Sourcing From Multiple Contentful Spaces

To source from multiple Contentful environments/spaces, add another configuration for gatsby-source-contentful in gatsby-config.js:

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_space_id`,
        accessToken: process.env.CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
      },
    },
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_second_space_id`,
        accessToken: process.env.SECONDARY_CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
      },
    },
  ],
}