Gatsby: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 9. Gatsby Plugins and Starters

There are many ways to extend Gatsby sites to incorporate additional functionality or to provide kickstarters for faster development. In particular, plugins and starters are crucial for offering additional capabilities beyond the scope of what Gatsby supplies out of the box. Like Gatsby themes, which we’ll cover in Chapter 10, plugins and starters can both be installed entirely from the Gatsby CLI. In addition to officially supported plugins that represent common use cases, there are many community-supported plugins and starters available on the Gatsby website. We’ve already seen several examples of both in this book, but we haven’t yet covered how to make your own.

In this chapter, we’ll explore not only how to create Gatsby plugins and starters, but also how to make them available to other interested developers by publishing them. In addition to tailor-made starters, I’ll show you how to make your own source plugins, which are responsible for retrieving data from other sources, and transformer plugins, which transform data so Gatsby can work with it.

Creating Gatsby Starters

As we covered earlier in the book, starters in Gatsby are boilerplate example projects that Gatsby developers can employ to spin up a new site for rapid development. So far in this book, we’ve covered three extremely common starters used frequently by Gatsby practitioners as foundations for new sites: gatsby-starter-hello-world, gatsby-starter-default, and gatsby-starter-blog. ...