George Nance

Don’t use frontmatter to seperate your markdown files in GatsbyJS - Use the file system

Introduction

I have a link to the code I used for this tutorial on github

I am going to walk you through how to seperate your markdown files in Gatsby in a way that more sense then a frontmatter field.

How splitting up markdown is normally done

For the longest time I had to use solutions like front matter fields to specify the difference between posts and pages types

Before I learned you could tell GraphQL to know the which markdown file was a page or post. My front matter would look something like this:

markdown
---
title: 'How to be productive as a programmer with ADHD'
date: '2020-06-19'
published: true
tags: ['adhd', 'productivity']
coverImage: cover.jpg
type: article
description: Being productive while having ADHD can sometimes feel like a colossal task.
---

I would use type: article so I could filter out only posts or articles.

Why its bad

  • Adds extra syntax to every markdown file
  • It can easily become error prone
  • File Systems were designed for this task.

I wanted to simplify how my blog generated articles so I could focus on creating content and not figuring out why a post was missing.

And I already had a folder structure like this:

my folder structure

Wouldn’t it be nice if GatsbyJS knew if a markdown file was a page or blog post based on the folder it's in?

That makes more sense to me.

Prerequisites

You need to have gatsby-source-filesystem installed.

If you are using gatsby-transform-remark or gatsby-plugin-mdx you will already have this installed. 👍

Step 1 - Create the folder structure

Create the folder structure you want to use.

I like to separate my posts from my code so I put mine at the root level like this project-folder/content

This is the folder structure I will use

bash
📂 content
├── 📂 blog
│ ├── 📂 hello-world
│ │ ├── 📄 index.md
│ │ └── 🖼 salty_egg.jpg
│ ├── 📂 my-second-post
│ │ └── 📄 index.md
│ └── 📂 new-beginnings
│ └── 📄 index.md
└── 📂 pages
├── 📂 about
│ ├── 📄 index.md
│ └── 🖼 profile-pic.jpg
└── 📂 now
└── 📄 now.md

Each page or blog post has its own folder. This makes it easy to keep images or files it needs organized.

Step 2 - Set up the file system in Gatsby

Install gatsby-source-filesystem if you don’t have it

bash
yarn add gatsby-source-filesystem

We are going to be using the Gatsby Source File System to separate our folders.

To do this, first add gatsby-source-filesystem as a plugin to gatsby.config.js . You might already have this added.

For each type of content you want separated add a new gatsby source filesystem object with the name and path.

In our case, we want to separate posts and pages, so we need 2 sections.

It should look something like this:

js
plugins: [
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
options: {
path: `${__dirname}/content/blog`,
name: `blog`,
},
},
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
options: {
path: `${__dirname}/content/pages`,
name: `page`,
},
},
...
}

Step 3 - Update Gatsby config

In gatsby-node.js add this code to onCreateNode.

js
exports.onCreateNode = ({ node, getNode, actions }) => {
const { createNodeField } = actions;
if (node.internal.type === `MarkdownRemark`) {
const parent = getNode(node.parent);
let collection = parent.sourceInstanceName;
createNodeField({
node,
name: 'collection',
value: collection,
});
}
};

If you are using MDX, just swap out MarkdownRemark for Mdx

First off, we make sure that the node we are editing is a markdown file, we are grabbing the parent node so we can access some additional information.

sourceInstanceName is the field we set on gatsby-source-filesystem in the last step.

allMarkdownRemark alone does not have this field for us to use so we have to get it from the parent.

Then you add a field to the markdown node for the collection it belongs to.

Step 4 - Let the separating begin

We can now pass a filter to gatsby to let it know what collection we want to access. Hooray! No more frontmatter types

graphql
query {
allMarkdownRemark(
sort: { fields: [frontmatter___date], order: DESC }
filter: { fields: { collection: { eq: "blog" } } }
) {
edges {
node {
id
fields {
slug
}
frontmatter {
title
published
slug
date(formatString: "MMMM DD, YYYY")
}
excerpt(pruneLength: 280)
}
}
}
}

Wrap Up

Thanks for stopping by! This was a quick tutorial I made to solve an issue I was having with GatsbyJS. This article is a part of my "write one blog post a month" challenge.

I have a link to the code I used for this tutorial on github

If you would like to see more tutorials like this, let me know on twitter or by subscribing to my newletter.

Also I recommmend checking out Josh W Comeau if you want more Gatsby goodness. His tutorial on darkmode inspired me to add it to my site

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