
Announcing Gatsby 2.0.0 - kylemathews
https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-09-17-gatsby-v2/
======
pknopf
I tried using Gatsby for a project of mine. The moment I tried to do _any_
thing not supported OOTB, it seemed I was fighting the tooling (and webpack)
at every corner. It was incredibly difficult just to get a simple tree
navigation.

One thing I thankful for though is that it gave me a new-found love for the
simple and non-flashy libs/tooling.

In the end, I wound up writing my own static site generator.

[https://github.com/pauldotknopf/statik](https://github.com/pauldotknopf/statik)

You may say to yourself "So you just wrote your own Gatsby!?"

No, I didn't. I wrote a thin lib that you can register endpoints and extract
them to disk. It does absolutely nothing else. The idea is that I will wrote
my own markdown rendering, navigation, html/css, etc for each project. "But
what about the time it takes to implement all the features you need!" The time
it takes to implement these minor things take far less time in the long run,
and I will never have to be in an endless fight with the tooling to get simple
tree navigation. Every feature I implement is exactly what I need, no more, no
less.

Sure, it isn't as _cool_ as React, webpack, etc. But I'm a lot happier.

~~~
hnzix
Did you evaluate Jekyll or Hugo for your use case?

~~~
pknopf
I did. IMO, Hugo is the closest of any static gen to hitting the sweet spot of
simplicity and feature set.

However, there were some features that I simply could not add to it. Features
that if I didn't have the tooling bogging me down, I could implement in 10
minutes.

[https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/3659](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/3659)

I can't fault Hugo for that GH issue though. The author's response is valid.

I know I sound grumpy. Hugo is great. It is a far better option than Gatsby.
The features that it has are very simple and straightforward (no graph
nodes/graphql/webpack- _esque_ abstractions). I actually highly recommend
Hugo.

edit: To add onto my original comment, I encourage people to read this blog
post.

[http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/](http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/)

~~~
annywhey
I took the approach of bolting a second compiler on top of Hugo(a custom
Python script) to get the extra things I wanted in Hugo.

It still took a while, but I did get to leverage the parts of Hugo that
already work well.

I don't think there's much in the way of winning either way, since now I have
a Build Process.

~~~
pknopf
But it's _your_ compiler, that does _exactly_ what _you_ want.

;)

------
amanzi
I hadn't heard of this before but it looks really good. Good documentation,
lots of plugins and community support, and appears to be in use by some big
companies. Anyone here had good or bad experiences with it?

~~~
nazka
I am starting to do my blog with it and so far it's really good. One thing I
love is how it is built to be a Progressive Web App. If you don't know what
that is: after downloading your page, your browser will start to download the
other pages of your website automatically so they will be able to render
instantly. It's also amazing for documentation. You go on one page and the
other pages will be preloaded so that means that even without network you can
still browse all the pages and again with rendering instantly. Go on their
website and check in the Chrome DevTool in Network, you will see.

Another thing I like is how they leverage GraphQL. I am not a fan to use it as
a back end language but for a query tool existing only on the front it all
makes sense and it's really effective. You can easily build query to generate
all kind of pages and contents automatically. And that from all kind of
sources (markdown, CSV).

There are many other great stuff like their source/transform plugin to be able
to query on any (if the plugin is made) source.[1] Or having to only learn 2
API call (onCreateNode, onCreatePage) and GraphQL to start to do many of the
biggest things... Or I can talk about how when building the project Gatsby
makes all the call to any headless CMS to retrieve all the data to leverage
them while still being able to create a static website at the same time...[2]

Finally Netlify provides a dead simple way to host your project. You just need
to create an account and link your Github repo on their platform and every
time your master will change your website will be automatically deployed. Ho
and it's free...

[1] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/source-plugin-
tutorial/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/source-plugin-tutorial/)

[2] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/wordpress-source-plugin-
tutori...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/wordpress-source-plugin-tutorial/)

~~~
BigJono
Progressive Web Apps aren't universally a good idea. I'm sharing a 6Mb/s down
link with 5 other people. The absolute _last_ thing I want is every website to
pre-cache 40 pages for every page I browse.

~~~
kylemathews
Absolutely!

Gatsby tries to balance making your site work at some level offline w/ not
precaching too much.

By default we cache the front page & then do "run-time" caching as the user
visits different pages so ensuring they can at least return to the pages
they've visited when offline.

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ValentineC
I built a landing page for a nonprofit I'm involved in [1] with Gatsby v2
(while it was in beta/rc), with close to no knowledge of the Webpack and React
ecosystems. It's been fairly pleasant to work with, and I look forward to
building more sites with it and contributing back where I can!

It was also fun to see my site achieve 100% with ease on Chrome's Lighthouse
tests. I still have no idea what kind of impact it has on SEO, but every
little bit helps.

Thanks to all who contributed!

[1] [https://cu.sg](https://cu.sg)

------
SkyPuncher
My startup's website is currently built on Gatsby. I originally looked to it
because we wanted to get something up very quickly for a tradeshow. 16 months
later we've never gotten around to "we redo it down the road". It's still
serving us very well.

My thoughts:

Pros:

* I love React, so Gatsby was a natural extension for me. It's very helpful to use the same toolchain/mindset in most places.

* I don't have to learn/forget/relearn all of the stupid bugs in Wordpress/Drupal/etc. Gatsby has some shortcomings, but in general if you've worked with React, you already know where the shortcomings and limitations are.

Cons:

* Deployment isn't terribly straight forward if you have a custom use case. I ended up manually building and serving with a small node script.

* It can be very, very (too easy) to accidentally share a server side ENV variable into the JS build. You have to be very careful not to leak an important key.

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nkristoffersen
I look forward to migrating to 2.0. I use GatsbyJS 1 for many websites. One
website I regenerate every morning to build over 1600 pages
([https://frekvensapp.com](https://frekvensapp.com)). I’m told 2.0 has much
better support for large sites.

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hemantv
I built [https://www.goodlyapp.com](https://www.goodlyapp.com) using Gatsby
the performance has been amazing.

The best things is using data at build time rather than run time. Which make
everything so fast for the end user.

~~~
chimen
No offence but seems like a complete ripoff of their homepage design:
[https://i.imgur.com/O1bGpvP.png](https://i.imgur.com/O1bGpvP.png)

~~~
hemantv
Yes I was looking for design inspiration. Anything wrong with it?

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kornish
Congrats on the release! Looks great.

Looks like Gatsby has raised a ~4m seed. I'm curious: how does Gatsby (the
company) make/plan to make revenue from Gatsby (the library)? Support,
hosting, or something else?

~~~
kylemathews
We're building cloud products which complement the OSS product.

We launched our product, Gatsby Preview, into alpha in July
[https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-07-17-announcing-
gatsby-p...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-07-17-announcing-gatsby-
preview/)

A lot of people really love building sites with headless CMSs and Gatsby.
Gatsby Preview gives content editors live preview of changes they're making in
the CMS on a real version of the site.

We launched with support for Contentful and are adding support for other
headless CMSs along with traditional CMSs running in headless mode like Drupal
and WordPress.

Also check out our launch blog post
[https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-05-24-launching-new-
gatsb...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-05-24-launching-new-gatsby-
company/)

------
m0meni
Writing sites with Gatsby is amazing, but is there any way to opt out of
JS/PWA completely? It'd be nice to have a setting where Gatsby just called
ReactDomServer.renderToStaticMarkup.

------
chimen
My project ([https://qards.io](https://qards.io)) was #2 on ProductHunt last
Saturday and I can say I have some knowledge of Gatsby. The community is very,
very vibrant and I'm surprised with the number of plugins they have.

The maintainers are very active and responsive and the project itself does
many things...just right.

~~~
moeamaya
Somehow missed this and I’m a big PH user, but you’ve built an awesome
product!

Love the simplicity and way you’ve refined the marketing around your app.

------
syrusakbary
Congrats Kyle & team! So good to see your company moving forward and getting
shaped into a great product.

[http://Graphene-Python.org/](http://Graphene-Python.org/) is still using
Gatsby after 2 years from the first release, keep up the good work! :)

------
Torminguar
The optimizations Gatsby does by default are great, especially if you're a web
performance noob. But, I feel like Gatsby and static website generators in
general are the product of front-end developers learning to code Javascript
with no knowledge of HTML or the underlying technologies.

Nothing wrong with having a chance to make a website with your favorite front-
end framework, but when you've been doing web apps with Javascript and
websites with only a CSS framework if any, these generators just feel like a
bit too much. Not everything needs to be an "app", if you catch my drift.

If you want to make a website that's blazing fast and you happen to know React
well, Gatsby really is your best bet.

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tekmaven
This should be the recommended starter for React developers, over create-
react-app!

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bgdkbtv
Congrats! Going to use Gatsby V2 to convert a WP website to headless WP with
ACF and static Gatsby on frontend.

Reason why WP is because its still the best editing experience and very simple
of anyone to get started with.

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deltron3030
How viable is the enhancement of Gatsby with client side interactive stuff
(maybe with Create React App widgets) on a Gatsby site?

I'm currently reasearching different workflows and tools where you can
transition from a landing page to a saas without changing the dev environment
that much.

The closest thing I've found is in the Laravel/Vue ecosystem, where you can
start with a static site generator (Jigsaw), and progress into a full Laravel
application from there, as it uses the same stuff under the hood minus the
backend.

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kirankn
Looking at moving a fairly large site to Gatsby. Hoping v2 improvements will
help us.

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pixelHD
Just finished publishing my blog using gatsby 1.8! Congratulations and great
job!

