gatsby-source-git
Source plugin for pulling files into the Gatsby graph from abitrary Git repositories (hosted anywhere). This is useful if the markdown files you wish to render can’t live within your gatsby codebase, or if need to aggregate content from disparate repositories.
It clones the repo(s) you configure (a shallow clone, into your cache folder if
you’re interested), and then sucks the files into the graph as File
nodes, as
if you’d configured
gatsby-source-filesystem
on that directory. As such, all the tranformer plugins that operate on files
should work exactly as they do with gatsby-source-filesystem
eg with
gatsby-transformer-remark
, gatsby-transformer-json
etc.
The only difference is that the File
nodes created by this plugin will
also have a gitRemote
field, which will provide you with various bits of
Git related information. The fields on the gitRemote
node are
mostly provided by
IonicaBazau/git-url-parse, with
the addition of ref
and weblink
fields, which are
the 2 main things you probably want if you’re constructing “edit on github”
style links.
N.B. Although with respect to sourcing this works as a drop-in replacement for gatsby-source-filesystem
, there are a number of helpers included in that module (createFilePath
, createRemoteFileNode
, createFileNodeFromBuffer
) that are not duplicated here – but you can still import and use them from there as needed.
Requirements
Requires git to be installed, and to be callable using the command git
.
Ideally we’d use nodegit, but it doesn’t support shallow clones (see libgit2/libgit2#3058) which would have a significant effect on build times if you wanted to read files from git repositories with large histories.
Install
npm install --save gatsby-source-git
Configuration
Plugin options
name
: A machine name label for each plugin instance.remote
: The url to clone from.branch
(optional): The branch or tag to use. If none supplied, we try to use the ‘default’ branch.patterns
(optional): Passed to fast-glob to determine which files get sucked into the graph.local
(optional): Specify the local path for the cloned repo. If omitted, it will default to a directory within the local Gatsby cache. Note that using a location outside the cache will prevent you changing the branch via gatsby-config.js. You will need to synchronise the branch of the local checkout yourself. However if clones are painful and slow for you, then using a custom location will prevent your local repo getting trashed when Gatsby clears the cache, which should help.
Example gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
plugins: [
// You can have multiple instances of this plugin to read source files from
// different repositories or locations within a repository.
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-git`,
options: {
name: `repo-one`,
remote: `https://bitbucket.org/stevetweeddale/markdown-test.git`,
branch: `develop`,
// Only import the docs folder from a codebase.
patterns: `docs/**`
}
},
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-git`,
options: {
name: `repo-two`,
remote: `https://bitbucket.org/stevetweeddale/markdown-test.git`,
// Specify the local checkout location, to avoid it being trashed on
// cache clears.
local: '/explicit/path/to/repo-two',
// Multiple patterns and negation supported. See https://github.com/mrmlnc/fast-glob
patterns: [`*`, `!*.md`]
}
}
]
};
This will result in File
nodes being put in your data graph, it’s then up to you to do whatever it is you want to do with that data.
Private repositories
Most git hosting providers support authentication via URL, either in the form of username and password or more commonly access tokens. So to use a private github repository as an example, you would firstly generate a personal access token. Now you don’t want that in your repo, so instead you’d set an OS environment variable and then read that environment variable into your plugin config something like:
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-git`,
options: {
name: `my-repo`,
remote: `https://myuser:${process.env.GITHUB_TOKEN}@github.com/myuser/my-repo`,
},
}
How to query
You can query file nodes exactly as you would node query for nodes created with
gatsby-source-filesystem
,
eg:
{
allFile {
edges {
node {
extension
dir
modifiedTime
}
}
}
}
Similarly, you can filter by the name
you specified in the config by using
sourceInstanceName
:
{
allFile(filter: { sourceInstanceName: { eq: "repo-one" } }) {
edges {
node {
extension
dir
modifiedTime
}
}
}
}
And access some information about the git repo:
{
allFile {
edges {
node {
gitRemote {
webLink
ref
}
}
}
}
}
Creating pages
If you want to programatically create pages on your site from the files in your git repo, you should be able to follow the standard examples, such as part 7 of the Gatsby tutorial or the standard docs page.