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

Routing and authentication in React applications

To achieve authenticated experiences, we will be using routing. Before jumping into how we do this in Gatsby, let's familiarize ourselves with how routing works within React applications. Routing is the process of navigating a user around different parts of an application.

For this example, I will be bootstrapping a React project using create-react-app. I have included steps for its installation but feel free to skip them and use your own React implementation. Keep this section's demo separate from your Gatsby project.

Important Note

In the following example, we will be using the @reach/router package for routing. Gatsby uses @reach/router under the hood, so by using the package here in React, it will be easy to recognize patterns when we move on to implementing them in Gatsby.

As React developers, routing is a common part of building applications – let's remind ourselves of the routing basics:

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