NPB Dev Blog

working with Gatsby

2020-01-11

Gatsby is a React based static site generator. Gatsby makes the process of making simple static websites extremely efficient, allowing a developer to build a fully functioning React website in minutes. I decided to use Gatsby to build my personal portfolio website because of the wide varied of user created tools, plugins and themes available for use. Gatsby also has an amazing documentation page (https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/) which is very encoring and approachable to newcomers.

Gatsby features to main modes for compiling a website, gatsby develop and gatsby build. When using gatsby develop Gatsby launches a development server that is used to see live updates to your pages during development. Using gatsby build is successfully completed, everything you need to deploy your site ends up in the public folder at the root of the site. The build includes minified files, transformed images, JSON files with information and data for each page, static HTML for each page.

I’m currently reading through the Gatsby Conceptual guide on the documentation page. Before diving into the more technical aspects of working with Gatsby I want to have a higher level understanding of what it has to offer. Gatsby is supported by a very encouraging community of developers and I am looking forward to becoming a contributing member.