Creating Pages from Data Programmatically

Gatsby and its ecosystem of plugins provide all kinds of data through a GraphQL interface. This guide will show how that data can be used to programmatically create pages.

Note: For most use cases you’ll be able to use the File System Route API to create pages. Please read on if you need more control over the page creation or consume data outside of Gatsby’s GraphQL data layer.

Prerequisites

Though you can use any data source you’d like, this guide will show how to create pages from Markdown files (following after the example introduced in earlier guides).

Creating pages

The Gatsby Node API provides the createPages extension point which you’ll use to add pages. This function will give you access to the createPage action which is at the core of programmatically creating a page.

For each page you want to create you must specify the path for visiting that page, the component template used to render that page, and any context you need in the component for rendering.

The context parameter is optional, though often times it will include a unique identifier that can be used to query for associated data that will be rendered to the page. All context values are made available to a template’s GraphQL queries as arguments prefaced with $, so from our example above the slug property will become the $slug argument in our page query:

Specifying a template

The createPage action requires that you specify the component template that will be used to render the page. Here is an example of what the referenced template could look like:

Notice that you’re able to query with the $slug value from your context as an argument, which ensures that you’re returning only the data that matches that specific page. As a result, you can provide the title and html from the matching markdownRemark record to your component. The context values are also available as the pageContext prop in the template component itself.

Not just Markdown

The gatsby-transformer-remark plugin is just one of a multitude of Gatsby plugins that can provide data through the GraphQL interface. Any of that data can be used to programmatically create pages.

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