Gatsby Recipes

Gatsby Recipes, a new tool to automate common site building tasks. Kyle Matthews - Recipes Announcement Post

What are they?

A recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to prepare or make something. Gatsby Recipes are no different, they’re essentially a set of instructions to tell the Gatsby CLI what to install or create.

Using the Gatsby CLI we can now leverage some of the concepts from infrastructure as code in our frontend applications. This tool isn’t limited to just Gatsby despite what the name implies. This can be run on any UI application that utilizes a package.json and NPM. (caveats in that it uses Yarn by default but ultimately it’s not that big of a deal)

The official method of using Recipes is to use the following command: gatsby recipes will get us a list of the Official Gatsby Recipes that ship with the CLI. However, we can pass a custom Recipe to the CLI instead. This can be either a URL, such as a Gist, or a local path to the MDX file.

What can they do?

We can automate common site building tasks with Gatsby Recipes.

Such as:

• Adding scripts to our package.json
• Adding dependencies to our project
• Adding Files to our project
• Updating our Gatsby Config (if we’re using them on a Gatsby site)

Are they only for Gatsby Apps?

Despite what the name implies, you can use Recipes on any project with a package.json. Adding an NPM script, or dependency, can be done on a variety of projects, but adding to a gatsby-config file obviously wouldn’t need to be done. Adding files, templates, etc are also possible.

The one gotcha I’ve found in experimenting with this has been the Gatsby CLI uses yarn with recipes by default. So if you’re not using Yarn you’ll need to delete the yarn.lock file.