Creating a blog with Webiny Headless CMS + Gatsby

In this tutorial we will learn how to use Gatsby with the Webiny Headless CMS.

All of the code shown in this tutorial is also hosted in our GitHub repository.

Prerequisites

1. Gatsby-cli

Install gatsby-cli using the command below. We will use it to create our Gatsby Blog.

npm install -g gatsby-cli

2. A Webiny Project

Make sure you have a working Webiny project set up.

3. Content Delivery API URL

The Headless CMS app exposes data via the Content Delivery API, which is a simple GraphQL API that dynamically updates its schema on content model changes that you make. Once you've deployed your API stack (using the yarn webiny deploy api command), you should be able to find the Content Delivery API URL in the console output:

4. Content Delivery API Access Token

In order to access the data via the Content Delivery API, we'll need a valid Access Token. These can be created via the Access Tokens form, which you can reach via the main menu:

Create a new token and make sure to copy the actual token string. We'll need it soon.

Creating our first content model

Now that we have all of the prerequisites out of the way, it's time to create our first content model. Let's open the Models section of the Headless CMS app.

Let's create a new content model named Blog Post. Click on the "plus" icon in the lower right corner of the screen and in the dialog that's about to be shown, enter the following:

For the content model group, we'll use the Ungrouped, which is the default group that comes out of the box with every Headless CMS app installation.

Content model groups give you a way to organize the content models inside the main menu, allowing you to build logical sections for your content editors. You can click here to learn more.

Once we've submitted the form in the dialog, we should be redirected to the Content Model Editor. Let's add two fields: title as a Text, and body as a Rich Text field.

INFO: Rich Text field returns a slate object, which is not a valid React element. So, you need to parse that data to render it. You can implement your own parser or use a package created by one of our community members: webiny-richtext-serializer. For usage example, please see this sandbox.

They will match every blog post's title and body (content), respectively.

Save the changes by clicking on the Save button in the top right corner of the screen.

Now it's time to create the actual content. Proceed by clicking on the View content button, located on the left side of the Save button.

You can also reach the content area by clicking on the newly added Blog Post item in the main menu:

Managing Content

As mentioned, navigate to Headless CMS > Ungrouped > Blog Post and create a blog post or two. Feel free to unleash your creativity. 😉

Once you feel happy with the blog post, you can save the changes by clicking the Save button, located at the bottom of the form.

The next and final step is to publish the blog post, which will make it actually visible in the Content Delivery API. To do that, click on the Publish icon, found at the right side in the form header.

Now that we've covered the basics of creating content models and managing content, we can move on to the Gatsby part of this tutorial.

Creating a Gatsby Blog

We can create a new Gatsby app by running gatsby new myBlog command.

This will generate a new folder in your working directory.

Ideally, you should create your Gatsby project in a folder outside of the Webiny project.

Now that we have a new Gatsby app ready to go, let's see what it takes to make a simple page that renders a list of all blog posts that we have just created.

Pulling GraphQL data (Blog Posts) into Gatsby

We will navigate to our myBlog folder created earlier and install NPM package gatsby-source-graphql. This will allow us to fetch the Blog Posts into our Gatsby app.

yarn add gatsby-source-graphql

We will add this plugin in the plugins array found in gatsby-config.js (located in the root of our Gatsby project) and configure its options like below. Most importantly, we will replace CONTENT_DELIVERY_API_URL with our API's URL and <CONTENT_DELIVERY_TOKEN> with the token you created earlier (eg: d3b45980479...)...

{
  resolve: `gatsby-source-graphql`,
  options: {
    typeName: "someTypeName",
    fieldName: "webinyHeadlessCms",
    url: "<CONTENT_DELIVERY_API_URL>/cms/read/production",
    headers: {
      authorization: "<CONTENT_DELIVERY>"
    }
  },
}

We are using the read API in order to pull Blog Post data and the production alias which points to the production environment because that is where we published our content earlier.

Once we have these ready, we can jump to the code. The following snippet shows the code located in the pages/index.js file:

import React from "react"
import { graphql } from 'gatsby'
import Layout from "../components/layout"

// Implement a custom parser or use one from the community: `webiny-richtext-serializer`
function parseRichTextDataAsHTML(data) { ... }

// The IndexPage component that renders our blog posts
const IndexPage = ({data}) => {
  // GraphQL queried data is automatically inserted into the `data` parameter used below
  const blogPosts = data.webinyHeadlessCms.listBlogPosts.data

  // We render a nice list of blog posts
  const BlogPosts = blogPosts.map(post => (
    <div key={`post-${post.id}`}>
      <h1>{post.title}</h1>
      <p
        style={{whiteSpace: "pre-wrap"}}
        dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: parseRichTextDataAsHTML(post.body) }}
      />
    </div>
  ))

  return (
    {/* We use Gatsby's Layout to make our Blog look nice */}
    <Layout>
      {BlogPosts}
    </Layout>
  )
}

export default IndexPage

// A GraphQL query that fetches our blogs' data
export const query = graphql`{
  webinyHeadlessCms {
    listBlogPosts {
      data {
        id
        createdOn
        title
        body
      }
    }
  }
}`

Previewing the page

Let's run yarn dev in our Gatsby project directory so we can see our page in action:

Note: In order to fetch the latest CMS data and update your content you will need to stop your Gatsby app and run gatsby develop again. If you are in production mode, you need to run gatsby build as well as gatsby serve.

Conclusion

Congratulations! 🎉

We have successfully created a simple page that displays a list of all created blog posts, all powered by Webiny Headless CMS and Gatsby.

The same can also be achieved with other popular tools, like Next.js. To learn more, click here.

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FYI: The blog was originally written and published by Ashutosh