Incremental Gatsby Builds with GitHub Actions

If you build a large website with Gatsby or use Gatsby in combination with a CMS such as GraphCMS, the build can take a long time. For this reason Gatsby offers the option of an incremental build, see Conditional Page Builds. I hope this post helps you to reduce the build time.

TL;DR

• Use the environment variable GATSBY_EXPERIMENTAL_PAGE_BUILD_ON_DATA_CHANGES to enable conditional page builds.
• Persist the .cache and public directories between builds.

Behind the Scenes

In my example I used Gatsby in combination with GraphCMS and GitHub Actions. Whenever a change is made in the CMS, an Amazon Lambda function is triggered by a Webhook, which then triggers a build in GitHub Actions. If you want to learn more about it, check out the following blog post:

Static site builds with GitHub Actions and GraphCMS

Marco Streng ・ Aug 5 '20

#graphql #github #javascript #gatsby

How to use

Use the environment variable GATSBY_EXPERIMENTAL_PAGE_BUILD_ON_DATA_CHANGES=true in your gatsby build command to enable conditional page builds.

GATSBY_EXPERIMENTAL_PAGE_BUILD_ON_DATA_CHANGES=true gatsby build --log-pages

The --log-pages parameter will output all the file paths that were updated or deleted at the end of the build stage.

You will need to persist the .cache and public directories between builds. This allows for comparisons and reuse of previously built files.

Github Actions

To persist the necessary directories I use GitHub cache action.

- name: Caching Gatsby
  id: gatsby-cache-build
  uses: actions/cache@v2
  with:
    path: |
      public
      .cache
    key: ${{ runner.os }}-gatsby-build-${{ github.run_id }}
    restore-keys: |
      ${{ runner.os }}-gatsby-build-

The key is a unique cache identifier. This is important because you cannot currently update the cache manually after a build run. So after each build a new cache is created.

Caches that have not been accessed within the last week are cleared.

restore-keys is a list of alternative keys that will be used to find the previous cache.

The complete GitHub Actions Workflow looks like this:

jobs:
  build:
    name: Build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Use Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: '12.x'
      - name: Caching Gatsby
        id: gatsby-cache-build
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        with:
          path: |
            public
            .cache
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-gatsby-build-${{ github.run_id }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-gatsby-build-
      - name: Installing dependencies
        run: yarn install
      - name: Building Gatsby site
        run: yarn build --log-pages
        env:
          GATSBY_EXPERIMENTAL_PAGE_BUILD_ON_DATA_CHANGES: true
          CI: true

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If you have any kind of feedback, suggestions or ideas - feel free to comment this post!

Comments

[Livio Brunner]

Thanks a lot. This was really useful!

FYI: This is not considered an incremental page build according to the Gatsby team:

Incremental builds isn't really the right term. We call it Conditional Page Builds. It only builds pages that are necessary but it's not the same as Incremental Builds on gatsby cloud.