from Hacker News

Announcing Gatsby 2.0.0

by kylemathews on 9/17/18, 9:59 PM with 34 comments

  • by pknopf on 9/17/18, 11:42 PM

    I tried using Gatsby for a project of mine. The moment I tried to do anything not supported OOTB, it seemed I was fighting the tooling (and webpack) at every corner. It was incredibly difficult just to get a simple tree navigation.

    One thing I thankful for though is that it gave me a new-found love for the simple and non-flashy libs/tooling.

    In the end, I wound up writing my own static site generator.

    https://github.com/pauldotknopf/statik

    You may say to yourself "So you just wrote your own Gatsby!?"

    No, I didn't. I wrote a thin lib that you can register endpoints and extract them to disk. It does absolutely nothing else. The idea is that I will wrote my own markdown rendering, navigation, html/css, etc for each project. "But what about the time it takes to implement all the features you need!" The time it takes to implement these minor things take far less time in the long run, and I will never have to be in an endless fight with the tooling to get simple tree navigation. Every feature I implement is exactly what I need, no more, no less.

    Sure, it isn't as cool as React, webpack, etc. But I'm a lot happier.

  • by amanzi on 9/17/18, 11:03 PM

    I hadn't heard of this before but it looks really good. Good documentation, lots of plugins and community support, and appears to be in use by some big companies. Anyone here had good or bad experiences with it?
  • by ValentineC on 9/17/18, 11:22 PM

    I built a landing page for a nonprofit I'm involved in [1] with Gatsby v2 (while it was in beta/rc), with close to no knowledge of the Webpack and React ecosystems. It's been fairly pleasant to work with, and I look forward to building more sites with it and contributing back where I can!

    It was also fun to see my site achieve 100% with ease on Chrome's Lighthouse tests. I still have no idea what kind of impact it has on SEO, but every little bit helps.

    Thanks to all who contributed!

    [1] https://cu.sg

  • by SkyPuncher on 9/18/18, 3:45 PM

    My startup's website is currently built on Gatsby. I originally looked to it because we wanted to get something up very quickly for a tradeshow. 16 months later we've never gotten around to "we redo it down the road". It's still serving us very well.

    My thoughts:

    Pros:

    * I love React, so Gatsby was a natural extension for me. It's very helpful to use the same toolchain/mindset in most places.

    * I don't have to learn/forget/relearn all of the stupid bugs in Wordpress/Drupal/etc. Gatsby has some shortcomings, but in general if you've worked with React, you already know where the shortcomings and limitations are.

    Cons:

    * Deployment isn't terribly straight forward if you have a custom use case. I ended up manually building and serving with a small node script.

    * It can be very, very (too easy) to accidentally share a server side ENV variable into the JS build. You have to be very careful not to leak an important key.

  • by nkristoffersen on 9/18/18, 6:45 AM

    I look forward to migrating to 2.0. I use GatsbyJS 1 for many websites. One website I regenerate every morning to build over 1600 pages (https://frekvensapp.com). I’m told 2.0 has much better support for large sites.
  • by hemantv on 9/17/18, 11:47 PM

    I built https://www.goodlyapp.com using Gatsby the performance has been amazing.

    The best things is using data at build time rather than run time. Which make everything so fast for the end user.

  • by kornish on 9/17/18, 11:24 PM

    Congrats on the release! Looks great.

    Looks like Gatsby has raised a ~4m seed. I'm curious: how does Gatsby (the company) make/plan to make revenue from Gatsby (the library)? Support, hosting, or something else?

  • by m0meni on 9/18/18, 12:09 AM

    Writing sites with Gatsby is amazing, but is there any way to opt out of JS/PWA completely? It'd be nice to have a setting where Gatsby just called ReactDomServer.renderToStaticMarkup.
  • by chimen on 9/18/18, 12:35 AM

    My project (https://qards.io) was #2 on ProductHunt last Saturday and I can say I have some knowledge of Gatsby. The community is very, very vibrant and I'm surprised with the number of plugins they have.

    The maintainers are very active and responsive and the project itself does many things...just right.

  • by syrusakbary on 9/17/18, 11:08 PM

    Congrats Kyle & team! So good to see your company moving forward and getting shaped into a great product.

    http://Graphene-Python.org/ is still using Gatsby after 2 years from the first release, keep up the good work! :)

  • by Torminguar on 9/18/18, 8:29 AM

    The optimizations Gatsby does by default are great, especially if you're a web performance noob. But, I feel like Gatsby and static website generators in general are the product of front-end developers learning to code Javascript with no knowledge of HTML or the underlying technologies.

    Nothing wrong with having a chance to make a website with your favorite front-end framework, but when you've been doing web apps with Javascript and websites with only a CSS framework if any, these generators just feel like a bit too much. Not everything needs to be an "app", if you catch my drift.

    If you want to make a website that's blazing fast and you happen to know React well, Gatsby really is your best bet.

  • by tekmaven on 9/17/18, 11:39 PM

    This should be the recommended starter for React developers, over create-react-app!
  • by bgdkbtv on 9/18/18, 1:07 AM

    Congrats! Going to use Gatsby V2 to convert a WP website to headless WP with ACF and static Gatsby on frontend.

    Reason why WP is because its still the best editing experience and very simple of anyone to get started with.

  • by deltron3030 on 9/18/18, 10:22 AM

    How viable is the enhancement of Gatsby with client side interactive stuff (maybe with Create React App widgets) on a Gatsby site?

    I'm currently reasearching different workflows and tools where you can transition from a landing page to a saas without changing the dev environment that much.

    The closest thing I've found is in the Laravel/Vue ecosystem, where you can start with a static site generator (Jigsaw), and progress into a full Laravel application from there, as it uses the same stuff under the hood minus the backend.

  • by kirankn on 9/18/18, 9:17 AM

    Looking at moving a fairly large site to Gatsby. Hoping v2 improvements will help us.
  • by pixelHD on 9/18/18, 12:26 AM

    Just finished publishing my blog using gatsby 1.8! Congratulations and great job!