gatsby-recipes

Gatsby Recipes

Gatsby Recipes is framework for automating common Gatsby tasks. Recipes are MDX files which, when run by our interpretor, perform common actions like installing NPM packages, installing plugins, creating pages, etc.

It's designed to be extensible so new capabilities can be added which allow Recipes to automate more things.

We chose MDX to allow for a literate programming style of writing recipes which enables us to port our dozens of recipes from https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/recipes/ as well as in the future, entire tutorials.

Read more about Recipes on the launch blog post

There's an umbrella issue for testing / using Recipes during its incubation stage.

Follow the issue for updates!

https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues/22991

Recipe setup

Upgrade the global gatsby-cli package to the latest with recipes.

npm install -g gatsby-cli@latest

To confirm that this worked, run gatsby --help in your terminal. The output should show the recipes command.

Running an example recipe

Now you can test out recipes! Start with a recipe for installing emotion by following these steps:

1. Create a new Hello World Gatsby site:

gatsby new try-emotion https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-hello-world

1. Navigate into that project directory:

cd try-emotion

1. Now you can run the emotion recipe with this command:

gatsby recipes emotion

You can see a list of other recipes to run by running gatsby recipes

Developing Recipes

An example MDX recipe

Here's how you would write the gatsby recipes emotion recipe you just ran:

# Setup Gatsby with Emotion

[Emotion](https://emotion.sh/) is a powerful CSS-in-JS library that supports both inline CSS styles and styled components. You can use each styling feature individually or together in the same file.

<!-- use three dashes to separate steps of the recipe -->

---

Install necessary NPM packages

<!-- refer to the API in this doc to see what APIs are available, like `NPMPackage` -->

<NPMPackage name="gatsby-plugin-emotion" />
<NPMPackage name="@emotion/core" />
<NPMPackage name="@emotion/styled" />

---

Install the Emotion plugin in gatsby-config.js

<GatsbyPlugin name="gatsby-plugin-emotion" />

---

Sweet, now it's ready to go.

Let's also write out an example page you can use to play
with Emotion.

<File
  path="src/pages/emotion-example.js"
  content="https://gist.githubusercontent.com/KyleAMathews/323bacd551df46e8e7b6146cbf827d0b/raw/5c60f168f30c505cff1ff2433e69dabe27ae9738/sample-emotion.js"
/>

---

Read more about Emotion on the official Emotion docs site:

https://emotion.sh/docs/introduction

You can browse the source of the official recipes. The recipes umbrella issue also has a number of recipes posted by community members.

How to run recipes

You can run built-in recipes, ones you write locally, and ones people have posted online.

To run a local recipe, make sure to start the path to the recipe with a period like gatsby recipes ./my-cool-recipe.mdx

To run a remote recipe, just paste in the path to the recipe e.g. gatsby recipes https://example.com/sweet-recipe.mdx

Recipe API

<GatsbyPlugin>

Installs a Gatsby Plugin in the site's gatsby-config.js.

Soon will support options.

<GatsbyPlugin name="gatsby-plugin-emotion" />

props

• name name of the plugin

<GatsbyShadowFile>

props

• theme the name of the theme (or plugin) which provides the file you'd like to shadow
• path the path to the file within the theme. E.g. the example file above lives at node_modules/gatsby-theme-blog/src/components/seo.js

<NPMPackage>

<NPMPackage name="lodash" version="latest" />

props

• name: name of the package(s) to install. Takes a string or an array of strings.
• version: defaults to latest
• dependencyType: defaults to production. Other options include development

<NPMScript>

<NPMScript name="test" command="jest" />

props

• name: name of the command
• command the command that's run when the script is called

<File>

props

• path path to the file that should be created. The path is local to the root of the Node.js project (where the package.json is)
• content URL to the content that should be written to the path. Eventually we'll support directly putting content here after some fixees to MDX.

Note that this content is stored in a GitHub gist. When linking to a gist you'll want to click on the "Raw" button and copy the URL from that page.

FAQ / common issues

Q) My recipe is combining steps instead of running them seperately!

We use the --- break syntax from Markdown to separate steps.

One quirk with it is for it to work, it must have an empty line above it.

So this will work:

# Recipes

---

a step

<File src="something.txt" content="something" />

But this won't

# Recipes
---

a step

<File src="something.txt" content="something" />

Q) What kind of recipe should I write?

If you’d like to write a recipe, there are two great places to get an idea:

• Think of a task that took you more time than other tasks in the last Gatsby site you built. Is there a way to automate any part of that task?
• Look at this list of recipes in the Gatsby docs. Many of these can be partially or fully automated through creating a recipe mdx file. https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/recipes/