How to Use Gatsby to Create Your Blog (And Work on It From Your Phone)

Are you a developer looking to start a personal blog? Or perhaps you already have a blog on a platform like WordPress or Medium, but you‘re frustrated by the lack of customization options and control over your content.

If so, you should consider using Gatsby to create your blog. Gatsby is a powerful static site generator that allows you to build blazing fast websites using React and GraphQL. It‘s become increasingly popular for blogging due to its excellent performance, flexibility, and developer experience.

In this post, I‘ll walk you through how to create a blog with Gatsby from scratch. I‘ll also show you how to host it for free with GitHub Pages and set up automated deployments so you can easily publish new posts from your phone. By the end of this guide, you‘ll have a fully functional Gatsby blog that you can customize to your heart‘s content.

Why Use Gatsby for Blogging?

Before we dive into the tutorial, let‘s discuss some of the benefits of using Gatsby for blogging compared to other platforms:

• Performance: Gatsby generates static HTML files for each page, which means your blog will load incredibly fast. No more waiting for server-side rendering or client-side hydration.

• Customization: With Gatsby, you have full control over your blog‘s design and functionality. You can easily customize the look and feel of your site using React components and CSS-in-JS.

• Scalability: Gatsby sites can handle high traffic without breaking a sweat. Since the pages are pre-built, you don‘t have to worry about server load or database queries.

• Developer experience: If you‘re a developer, you‘ll feel right at home with Gatsby. You can use familiar tools like React, Node.js, and GraphQL to build your blog.

• Ownership: With Gatsby, you own your content and can host it anywhere you want. You‘re not locked into a particular platform or vendor.

Now that you understand the benefits of using Gatsby, let‘s get started with creating your blog!

Step 1: Set Up Your Development Environment

To create a Gatsby blog, you‘ll need to have Node.js and Git installed on your machine. If you don‘t have them already, you can download Node.js from the official website and Git from here.

Once you have Node.js and Git set up, you can install the Gatsby CLI by running the following command in your terminal:

npm install -g gatsby-cli

The Gatsby CLI allows you to quickly create new Gatsby sites and run various development tasks.

Step 2: Create a New Gatsby Site

With the Gatsby CLI installed, you can now create a new Gatsby site using the default starter template. Run the following command in your terminal:

gatsby new my-blog

This will create a new directory called my-blog with the starter template files. Once the command finishes running, navigate into the directory:

cd my-blog

To start the development server and see your new site in action, run:

gatsby develop

You can now view your site at http://localhost:8000. You should see a homepage with a "Hello World" message and a couple of example blog posts.

Step 3: Configure Your Site Metadata

Before we start adding content to our blog, let‘s configure some basic site metadata. Open the gatsby-config.js file in the root of your project and update the siteMetadata object:

module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    title: ‘My Blog‘,
    description: ‘A blog about web development and other tech topics.‘,
    author: ‘@yourusername‘,
  },
  // ...
}

Replace the title, description, and author fields with your own information. This metadata will be used in various places throughout your site, such as the homepage and SEO tags.

Step 4: Write Your First Blog Post

Now that our site is set up, let‘s create our first blog post. Gatsby uses Markdown files to represent blog posts, which makes it easy to write and format your content.

Create a new directory called blog inside the content directory. Then, create a new file called my-first-post.md inside the blog directory with the following content:

---
title: My First Blog Post
date: 2023-05-01
description: This is my very first blog post using Gatsby!
---

# Hello, World!

Welcome to my new Gatsby blog. I‘m excited to start sharing my thoughts and experiences with you. 

In this post, I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself. My name is John Doe and I‘m a web developer based in New York City. I‘ve been working with React for the past three years and recently started exploring static site generators like Gatsby.

I decided to start this blog as a way to document my learning journey and share tips and tutorials with other developers. I‘ll be writing about a variety of topics, including:

- React
- Gatsby
- JavaScript
- CSS
- Web performance
- Accessibility
- And more!

If any of those topics interest you, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter [@johndoe](https://twitter.com/johndoe) to get notified whenever I publish a new post.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more content coming soon!

The content at the top of the file between the --- lines is called frontmatter. It allows you to specify metadata about your post, such as the title, date, and description. This information will be used to generate the post‘s page title, URL slug, and SEO tags.

The rest of the file is the actual content of your post, written in Markdown format. You can use standard Markdown syntax to format your text, create headings, links, lists, and more.

Save the file and restart your development server to see your new post at http://localhost:8000/blog/my-first-post/.

Step 5: Deploy Your Blog with GitHub Pages

Now that you have a basic blog up and running, let‘s deploy it so the world can see it! We‘ll use GitHub Pages to host our blog for free.

First, create a new repository on GitHub to store your blog‘s code. You can name it something like my-blog or yourusername.github.io.

Next, initialize a new Git repository in your project directory and push your code to GitHub:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/yourusername/my-blog.git
git push -u origin master

Replace yourusername and my-blog with your actual GitHub username and repository name.

Now, open your repository settings on GitHub and scroll down to the "GitHub Pages" section. Select the master branch as your source and click "Save".

GitHub will now build and deploy your site automatically. You can view it at https://yourusername.github.io/my-blog/.

Step 6: Set Up Automated Deployments with Travis CI

While you can deploy your blog manually by pushing to GitHub, it‘s more convenient to set up automated deployments. That way, whenever you push new changes to your repository, your blog will be automatically rebuilt and redeployed.

We‘ll use Travis CI to handle the automated deployments. First, sign up for a free account on the Travis CI website and connect it to your GitHub account.

Next, create a new file called .travis.yml in the root of your project with the following contents:

language: node_js

node_js:
  - "14"

cache:
  directories:
    - node_modules

deploy:
  provider: pages
  skip_cleanup: true
  github_token: $GITHUB_TOKEN
  keep_history: true
  local_dir: public
  on:
    branch: master

This configuration tells Travis to use Node.js version 14, cache the node_modules directory for faster builds, and deploy the contents of the public directory to GitHub Pages whenever changes are pushed to the master branch.

For the github_token field, you‘ll need to create a personal access token on GitHub with the repo scope. You can create one here. Once you have your token, add it as an environment variable in your Travis CI settings named GITHUB_TOKEN.

Commit the .travis.yml file and push it to GitHub. Travis will automatically detect the new file and start a build. If everything goes well, your blog should be deployed to GitHub Pages within a few minutes.

Step 7: Add More Posts and Customize Your Blog

Congratulations, you now have a fully functional Gatsby blog that‘s automatically deployed whenever you push changes to GitHub! You can now start adding more posts by creating new Markdown files in the content/blog directory.

Feel free to customize your blog‘s design and functionality by modifying the React components and CSS files in the src directory. You can also install additional Gatsby plugins to add features like syntax highlighting, RSS feeds, and more.

Bonus Tip: Editing Posts on Your Phone

One of the great things about using Markdown files for your blog posts is that you can easily edit them from your phone. All you need is a text editor app that supports Markdown and syncs with your GitHub repository.

Personally, I use the Working Copy app on iOS to edit my blog posts on the go. It allows me to clone my repository, make changes to files, and commit and push them back to GitHub all from my iPhone.

To get started, install Working Copy on your phone and log in with your GitHub account. Then, clone your blog‘s repository and navigate to the content/blog directory. You can now edit existing posts or create new ones right from your phone!

Conclusion

In this post, we‘ve covered how to create a blog using Gatsby and host it for free with GitHub Pages. We‘ve also set up automated deployments with Travis CI so you can easily publish new posts by pushing to GitHub.

By using Gatsby for your blog, you get the benefits of a fast, customizable, and scalable website that you own and control. Plus, with the ability to edit posts from your phone, you can easily publish new content on the go.

I hope this guide has been helpful in getting you started with Gatsby blogging. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @yourusername.

Happy blogging!

Additional Resources

• Gatsby Documentation
• Gatsby Tutorial
• Gatsby Starter Library
• Gatsby Plugin Library
• GitHub Pages Documentation
• Travis CI Documentation
• Markdown Cheatsheet