gatsby-source-contentstack

Contentstack provides a source plugin for pulling content into Gatsby from Contentstack stacks. It helps you query content types and entries in Gatsby using GraphQL.

Here’s an example site built using this source plugin: https://xenodochial-hodgkin-8a267e.netlify.com/

Install

npm install --save gatsby-source-contentstack

How to use

Open the gatsby-config.js file from the root directory of your Gatsby project and configure it with below parameters

// In your gatsby-config.js
plugins: [
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-source-contentstack`,
    options: {
      // Required: API Key is a unique key assigned to each stack.
      api_key: `api_key`,

      // Required: Delivery Token is a read-only credential. 
      delivery_token: `delivery_token`,
      
      // Required: Environment where you published your data.
      environment: `environment`,

      // Optional: CDN set this to point to other cdn end point. For eg: https://eu-cdn.contentstack.com/v3 
      cdn: `cdn_url`,

      // Optional: expediteBuild set this to either true or false
      expediteBuild: `boolean_value`,

      // Optional: Specify true if you want to generate custom schema
      enableSchemaGeneration : `boolean_value`,

      // Optional: Specify true if you want to generate optional graphql fields for mandatory Contentstack fields
      disableMandatoryFields : `boolean_value`,

      // Optional: Specify a different prefix for types. This is useful in cases where you have multiple instances of the plugin to be connected to different stacks.
      type_prefix: `Contentstack`, // (default)

      // Optional: Specify true if you want to download all your contentstack images locally
      downloadImages: `boolean_value`,

      // Optional: Specify the content types from which you want the plugin to retrieve data.
      contentTypes: [‘blog’,’author’],
      // This will fetch the data of the ‘blog’ and ‘author’ content types only.

      // Optional: Specify the content types that the plugin should exclude while fetching data of all content types.
      excludeContentTypes: [‘home’,’about’],
      // This will fetch the data of all the available content types excluding the ‘home’ and ‘about’ content types.

      // Note: Only one of the above options should be used to fetch data. If you add both options to fetch all contentTypes and excludeContentTypes, than only one of the query gets executed.

      // Optional: Include the locales that you want the plugin to fetch data from.
      locales: [‘en-us’,’fr-fr’],
      // In this case, the plugin will fetch only English (United States) and French (France) language data.

      // Optional: Specify the content types and locales of which you want the plugin to retrieve data.
    },
  },
]
// Note: access_token is replaced by delivery_token

There is a provision to speed up the gatsby build process. To do this, you can set the value of the expediteBuild to true. So when you set the value of this parameter to true, the build process is significantly enhanced as only published assets and entries are synced parallelly.

However, when you want to perform gatsby develop, ensure to set the value of expediteBuild to false.

How to query

You can query nodes created from Contentstack using GraphQL.

All content types and the corresponding entries are pulled from your stack. They'll be created in your site's GraphQL schema under contentstack${contentTypeID} and allContentstack${contentTypeID}.

Note: Learn to use the GraphQL tool and Ctrl+Spacebar at http://localhost:8000/___graphql to discover the types and properties of your GraphQL model.

Querying entries

If, for example, you have Blogs as one of your content types, you will be able to query its entries in the following manner:

{
  allContentstackBlogs {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        title
        url
        description
        banner {
          filename
          localAsset {
            base
            absolutePath
            publicURL
            url
            childImageSharp {
              fixed(width: 125, height: 125) {
                base64
              }
            }
          }
        }
        created_at
      }
    }
  }
}

Query Reference fields

Reference fields provide references to entries of another content type(s). Since fields from referred entry are often needed, the referred entry data is provided at the reference field.

Note: If referenced entries are not published or deleted, then the query will not return those entries in the response.

{
  allContentstackBlogs{
    edges {
      node {
        id
        title
        url
        description
        authors{
          name
        }
        created_at
      }
    }
  }
}

Querying downloaded images

Prerequisites

To use this, you need to have the following plugins installed:

• gatsby-transformer-sharp
• gatsby-plugin-sharp
• gatsby-source-filesystem

{
  allContentstackAssets {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        title
        localAsset {
          childImageSharp {
            fluid {
              base64
              aspectRatio
              src
              srcSet
              sizes
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Note: By default, 20 images can be downloaded concurrently. However, if you want to download more you can set GATSBY_CONCURRENT_DOWNLOAD=100.

For ex:- GATSBY_CONCURRENT_DOWNLOAD=100 gatsby develop

Remember that gatbsy-image doesn’t support GIF and SVG images.

To use GIF image, Gatsby recommends to import the image directly. In SVG, creating multiple variants of the image doesn’t make sense because it is vector-based graphics that you can freely scale without losing quality.

The new gatsby image plugin

The gatsby-image plugin lets you add responsive images to your site. By using this plugin, you can format and produce images of various qualities and sizes.

Prerequisites

To use this, you need to have the following plugins installed:

• gatsby-plugin-image
• gatsby-plugin-sharp
• gatsby-transformer-sharp

Description

Next step is to add an image to your page query and use the gatsbyImageData resolver to pass arguments that will configure your image.

The gatsbyImageData resolver allows you to pass arguments to format and configure your images. Using the Contentstack Image delivery APIs you can perform various operations on the images by passing the necessary parameters.

Lets understand this with an example. In the below example we have added several parameters to format the image.

{
  allContentstackBlog {
    edges {
      node {
        title
        image {
          gatsbyImageData(
            layout: CONSTRAINED
            crop: "100,100"
            trim: "25,25,100,100"
            backgroundColor:"cccccc"
            pad: "25,25,25,25"
          )
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Lets understand some parameters that we defined: layout: This defines the layout of the image, it can be CONSTRAINED, FIXED or FULL_WIDTH. The crop, trim, backgroundColor and pad parameters configure the image according to the values inserted by the user.

Note: To learn more about these parameters and other available options, read our detailed documentation on Contentstack Image delivery APIs.

This query below returns the URL for a 20px-wide image, to use as a blurred placeholder. The image is downloaded and converted to a base64-encoded data URI.

Here’s an example of the same:

{
  allContentstackBlog {
    edges {
      node {
        title
        image {
          gatsbyImageData(
            layout: CONSTRAINED
            placeholder: BLURRED
            crop: "100,100"
            trim: "25,25,100,100"
            backgroundColor:"cccccc"
            pad: "25,25,25,25"
          )
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

For more information checkout gatsby's documentation on usage of the new image plugin.