v4.19 Release Notes

Welcome to gatsby@4.19.0 release (July 2022 #2)

Key highlights of this release:

• Gatsby Head API - Better performance & more future-proof than react-helmet
• Release Candidate for gatsby-plugin-mdx v4 - Support for MDX v2 and more!

Also check out notable bugfixes.

Bleeding Edge: Want to try new features as soon as possible? Install gatsby@next and let us know if you have any issues.

Previous release notes

Full changelog

Gatsby Head API

Gatsby now includes a built-in Head export that allows you to add elements to the document head of your pages.

Compared to react-helmet or other similar solutions, Gatsby Head is easier to use, more performant, has a smaller bundle size, and supports the latest React features. You no longer need a third-party library to handle meta tags in Gatsby. Gatsby Head also automatically places your meta tags into the generated HTML so you also no longer need a Gatsby plugin in your gatsby-config.js.

The Head function has to return valid JSX which also means that you can use React’s composition model and define a reusable React component to more easily handle default values for your pages. You can learn more about this in the Adding an SEO component guide.

One thing to note is that every page that need to add some tags to document head needs to export or re-export a Head function. You may only do a re-export if the new page needs to have same tags as the previous.

One important difference between Gatsby Head API and solutions like react-helmet is that (at the moment) you lose the ability to define global defaults (e.g. in a layout component) and have them automatically applied everywhere. With Gatsby Head API your pages have to export a Head function to define meta tags for this specific page. To help with that you can use an SEO component or re-export the Head function from somewhere else:

For full details, see the Gatsby Head API reference guide. To learn how to use Gatsby Head API with TypeScript, head to the TypeScript and Gatsby guide.

This feature followed our RFC process, you can read RFC: Gatsby Head API to understand how the API was created.

Release Candidate for gatsby-plugin-mdx v4

In case you missed it: We’re working on a new major version of gatsby-plugin-mdx to support MDX v2, improve build & frontend performance, and simplify the API.

You can now try out a release candidate version, head to the MDX v2 RFC to learn more.

Notable bugfixes & improvements

• Publish gatsby-script, gatsby-link, and gatsby-core-utils both as CJS & ESM, via PR #36012 and PR #36020
• gatsby
  • Sanitize page state to remove non-serializable elements, via PR #36074
  • Remove the /___services endpoint and remove development proxy. Also remove proxyPort (aliased to port for now). Via PR #35675

Contributors

A big Thank You to our community who contributed to this release 💜

• Timxyx: fix(gatsby-source-contentful): Add proxy.protocol to Joi schema PR #36011
• ericapisani: chore(gatsby): upgrade lmdb to 2.5.3 PR #36087
• openscript
  • chore(docs): Add gatsby-link to transformIgnorePatterns PR #36076
  • chore(docs): update jest.config.js PR #36049