Gatsby V2 Tutorial Starter

Gatsby V2 Tutorial Starter is a Gatsby v2 blog starter that Justin Formentin built as the output of his step-by-step guide, "Guide to Build a Gatsby Site with Perfect Pagespeed Scores," and it is deployable to Netlify with one click.

What is Gatsby V2 Tutorial Starter?

Gatsby V2 Tutorial Starter is a starter kit for building a static blog with Gatsby v2, designed to accompany a written tutorial on creating a high-performance Gatsby site. It takes markdown content from a content folder and generates a blog with tag pages, syntax-highlighted code blocks, and built-in SEO metadata. The starter runs on React and Gatsby, and uses Node.js tooling for development and build. It is maintained by Justin Formentin and hosted on GitHub with 138 stars.

Key Features

The starter bundles a specific set of plugins and conventions that cover performance, SEO, and developer experience:

• Emotion styling — Uses Emotion for CSS-in-JS component styling, with a configurable theme.
• Code syntax highlighting — Renders highlighted code blocks out of the box for blog posts.
• Tags — Supports tagging posts and generates dedicated tag pages automatically through gatsby-node.js.
• SEO — Includes sitemap generation, Schema.org JSON-LD for Google Rich Snippets, Twitter Tags, OpenGraph Tags for Facebook/Google+/Pinterest, and a robots.txt file.
• Offline and manifest support — Adds a web app manifest and service worker so the blog can be installed and work offline.
• Gatsby Image — Responsive images with traced SVG loading, lazy-loading, and WebP support.
• Typography.js and typefaces — Uses Typography.js for global typography and typeface packages for faster font loading.
• Development tools — Ships with ESLint, Prettier, CircleCI support, and is optimized for Google Lighthouse audits.

Who is it for?

• Developers learning Gatsby: Follow the accompanying tutorial to see how each file and plugin contributes to a production-ready blog.
• Independent bloggers: Stand up a fast, SEO-optimized blog with tag support and offline capability without assembling plugins manually.
• Teams requiring a head start: Clone the repository and customize the theme and content to bootstrap a client project.

What can you do with Gatsby V2 Tutorial Starter?

• Launch a blog on Netlify: Use the one-click Deploy to Netlify button to publish a live site from the GitHub repository without configuring a CI pipeline.
• Publish markdown posts: Drop markdown files into the content directory and they become posts with syntax highlighting, responsive images, and social sharing metadata.
• Measure performance: Run a Lighthouse audit; the starter is optimized to achieve perfect scores, as documented in the tutorial.

How does the starter work?

The repository provides a standard Gatsby workflow: install dependencies with npm, run gatsby develop for local development, and gatsby build for a production build. The gatsby-node.js file generates post and tag pages from markdown files, while gatsby-config.js loads the plugins. A config folder holds theme and site metadata, and the static folder holds logos, favicons, and robots.txt. CircleCI configuration in .circleci enables automated testing and deployment.