Book Image

Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby

Book Image

Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby

Overview of this book

Gatsby is a powerful React static site generator that enables you to create lightning-fast web experiences. With the latest version of Gatsby, you can combine your static content with server-side rendered and deferred static content to create a fully rounded application. Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby provides a comprehensive introduction for anyone new to GatsbyJS and will help you get up to speed in no time. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide starts by teaching you the core concepts of GatsbyJS. You'll then discover how to build performant, accessible, and scalable websites with the GatsbyJS framework. Once you've worked through the practical projects in the book, you'll be able to build anything from a personal website to large-scale applications with authentication and make your site rise through those SEO rankings. By the end of this Gatsby development book, you'll be well-versed in every aspect of the tool's performance and accessibility and have learned how to build client websites that your users will love.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
7
Part 2: Going Live
12
Part 3: Advanced Concepts

Creating source plugins

As we mentioned in the Understanding Gatsby plugins section, source plugins are those that allow us to ingest data from a new source into our GraphQL layer. By creating a source plugin, we abstract the logic to source this data away from our site so that we can reuse it across multiple Gatsby projects if we want to. To understand how source plugins work, let's build one together. Let's source our total contributions from GitHub so that we can display them on our about page:

  1. The first thing we need to be able to do to pull data from GitHub is use an access token. Navigate to https://github.com/settings/tokens/new.
  2. Write a Note to help you identify your access token later:

    Figure 10.1 – GitHub personal access token generation

  3. Change the Expiration property to your desired length. Once the length of time has been selected, the token will be deleted and no longer work. If you prefer that it doesn't expire, you can select No Expiry...