Gatsby Quick start guide
Estimated duration: 10 minutes
This guide shows you how to connect Prepr to a Gatsby project to get data from Prepr CMS. You'll learn how to make a simple blog with Gatsby and Prepr CMS. By the end of this guide, you'll have a working app that looks like the image below.
If you want to skip ahead, clone the repository on GitHub (opens in a new tab) to run the demo locally.
Prerequisites
You need to have the following setup before you connect your Gatsby project to Prepr.
- A free Prepr account (opens in a new tab)
- An environment with demo data in Prepr
- The latest version of Node.js (opens in a new tab)
Step 1: Create a new Gatsby project
The instructions below will guide you on how to create an empty Gatsby project for your blog app.
If you have an existing Gatsby project then you can skip this step.
- Execute the command below to create a new Gatsby project.
npm init gatsby
Enter the options as shown in in the image below to create the prepr-gatsby
project structure used in this guide.
- When the project is successfully created, execute the commands below to go to the
prepr-gatsby
folder, the root directory of the project, and to start the project.
cd prepr-gatsby
npm run develop
-
You should now be able to view your app on your localhost, for example, http://localhost:8000/ (opens in a new tab).
-
Open your Gatsby project with your preferred code editor, for example, Visual Studio Code.
-
Go to the
src/pages
folder and replace the contents of theindex.js
file with the following code to display your blog:
import * as React from "react"
const IndexPage = () => {
return (
<main>
<h1>
My blog site
</h1>
</main>
)
}
export default IndexPage
export const Head = () => <title>My blog site</title>
You should now see something like the image below on your localhost.
Step 2: Connect to Prepr
Set up a connection to Prepr to retrieve CMS data with GraphQL. The instructions below show you how to connect to Prepr directly from your project so that you can execute GraphQL queries to request data from the Prepr API.
- For this project we use the
gatsby-source-graphql
data layer to connect to Prepr. Install the data layer by executing the following command in your terminal:
npm install gatsby-source-graphql
- We recommend using environment variables to store sensitive information like access tokens. To add environment variables, create a
.env
file in the root directory of your project and add the API URL as follows:
PREPR_GRAPHQL_URL=<YOUR-PREPR-API-URL>
-
Replace the placeholder value
<YOUR-PREPR-API-URL>
with the API URL of an access token from Prepr. This URL includes the access token for the environment you want to query from. Get this URL by logging into your Prepr account:
a. Go to Settings → Access tokens to view all the access tokens.
b. Copy the API URL value from the GraphQL Production access token to only retrieve published content items.Use the GraphQL Production API URL to request published content items for your live app and use the GraphQL Preview value to make a preview of unpublished content items for your content editors.
-
Add a plugin for the Gatsby data layer and make the
.env
file visible to the project by updating thegatsby-config.js
file with the following configuration:
/**
* @type {import('gatsby').GatsbyConfig}
*/
// Make the .env file available to the project
require("dotenv").config({
path: `.env`,
})
module.exports = {
siteMetadata: {
title: `Prepr Gatsby Quickstart`,
siteUrl: `https://www.yourdomain.tld`,
},
// Include a plugin for the Gatsby data layer
plugins: [
{
resolve: "gatsby-source-graphql",
options: {
typeName: "Prepr",
fieldName: "prepr",
url: process.env.PREPR_GRAPHQL_URL,
}
}
],
}
The next step is to fetch content from Prepr using the Gatsby data layer.
Step 3: Fetch multiple articles
Now that your app is connected to Prepr, fetch the blog articles from Prepr.
- Go to the
src/pages
folder and update theindex.js
to add a query to retrieve all articles and display the fetched articles in the front end.
import * as React from "react"
// Import functions to execute the query
import {graphql, useStaticQuery} from "gatsby";
const IndexPage = () => {
// Execute the query
const preprData = useStaticQuery(graphql`
query {
prepr {
Articles {
items {
_id
_slug
title
}
}
}
}
`)
// Assign a variable to the query results
const articles = preprData.prepr.Articles
return (
<main>
<h1>
My blog site
</h1>
{/* Display a list of articles from the query results */}
<ul>
{articles.items.map(article => (
<li key={article._id}>
{article.title}
</li>
))}
</ul>
</main>
)
}
export default IndexPage
export const Head = () => <title>My blog site</title>
You can create and test GraphQL queries using the Apollo explorer (opens in a new tab) from Prepr. Open the API Explorer from the Article content item page in Prepr or the access token page.
If you’re using preloaded demo data in your Prepr CMS environment as mentioned above in the Prerequisites section, you should have a few published articles as shown in the below image. The query will retrieve the ID, Slug, and Title of each article.
Stop the server you started before (CTRL-C
) and execute the command below in the terminal. If your app runs without errors, then the setup above was done correctly.
npm run develop
Now when you view the website on your localhost, you'll see something like the image below.
Step 4: Fetch individual articles
Now that you have the list of articles, add links to them. When a visitor clicks on a link, your app should open a detailed article page automatically. The instructions below show you how to create a route from the main page to the detailed page and how to fetch the article details based on the slug of the article that was clicked.
Add links
First add links to the articles.
- Update the
index.js
file to include a link on each article title as shown in the code below.
import * as React from "react"
import {graphql, useStaticQuery} from "gatsby";
const IndexPage = () => {
const preprData = useStaticQuery(graphql`
query {
prepr {
Articles {
items {
_id
_slug
title
}
}
}
}
`)
const articles = preprData.prepr.Articles
return (
<main>
<h1>
My blog site
</h1>
<ul>
{articles.items.map(article => (
<li key={article._id}>
{/* Add a link that references the article slug */}
<a href={article._slug}>{article.title}</a>
</li>
))}
</ul>
</main>
)
}
export default IndexPage
export const Head = () => <title>My blog site</title>
Now when you view the app, each article has its own link. When you click on the link, a new page opens with the slug in the URL, but a Page 404 error is displayed. Continue with the next step to fetch the article details and resolve this error.
Fetch article details
Add another query to fetch a specific article by its slug and display the article detail page with the fetched data when a visitor clicks an article title in the main page.
- Go to the
src
folder and create a new subfolder calledtemplates
. In this folder create thearticle.js
page with the query to retrieve a specific article by its slug.
import * as React from "react"
import {graphql} from "gatsby";
const ArticlePage = ({data}) => {
const article = data.prepr.Article
return (
<main>
<h1>
{article.title}
</h1>
{article.content.map((content,index) => (
<div key={index}>
{
content.__typename === "Prepr_Assets" &&
<img src={content.items[0].url} width="300" height="250" alt="{article.title}" />
}
{
content.__typename === 'Prepr_Text' &&
<div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: content.body }}></div>
}
</div>
))}
</main>
)
}
export const query = graphql`
query($slug: String!) {
prepr {
Article(slug: $slug) {
_id
title
content {
__typename
... on Prepr_Text {
body
text
}
... on Prepr_Assets {
items {
url
}
}
}
}
}
}
`
export default ArticlePage
export const Head = () => <title>Article Page</title>
Now that the query is added, fetch the individual article by its slug. Fetch the article title and the article content.
The Article content is stored in a Dynamic content field. Check out the GraphQL docs for more details on how to fetch the data within this field.
- Go to the root directory and create a new config file called
gatsby-node.js
. Add the following configuration to this file to define dynamic pages for each article:
// Retrieve the article slug to create dynamic pages
exports.createPages = async ({ actions, graphql }) => {
const { data } = await graphql(`
query {
prepr {
Articles {
items {
_slug
}
}
}
}
`)
data.prepr.Articles.items.forEach( (item) => {
const slug = item._slug
// Create dynamic pages based on the slug of an article
actions.createPage({
path: slug,
component: require.resolve(`./src/templates/article.js`),
context: { slug },
})
})
}
Stop the server you started before (CTRL-C
) and execute the command below in the terminal. If your app runs without errors, then the setup above was done correctly.
npm run develop
Now, when you view your site, you can click on an article which will direct you to that specific article like in the image below.
All done
Congratulations! You have successfully connected a Gatsby project to Prepr for a simple Blog app.
Next steps
To learn more on how to expand your project, check out the following resources:
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