gatsby-plugin-offline

Adds drop-in support for making a Gatsby site work offline and more resistant to bad network connections. It creates a service worker for the site and loads the service worker into the client.

If you’re using this plugin with gatsby-plugin-manifest (recommended) this plugin should be listed after that plugin so the manifest file can be included in the service worker.

Install

npm install --save gatsby-plugin-offline

How to use

// In your gatsby-config.js
plugins: [`gatsby-plugin-offline`]

Available options

In gatsby-plugin-offline 3.x, the following options are available:

• precachePages lets you specify pages whose resources should be precached by the service worker, using an array of globs. For example:

  gatsby-config.js

  plugins: [
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-plugin-offline`,
    options: {
      precachePages: [`/about-us/`, `/projects/*`],
    },
  },
  ]

  Note: while essential resources of specified pages will be precached, such as JavaScript and CSS, non-essential resources such as fonts and images will not be included. Instead, these will be cached at runtime when a user visits a given page that includes these resources.

• appendScript lets you specify a file to be appended at the end of the generated service worker (sw.js). For example:

  gatsby-config.js

  plugins: [
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-plugin-offline`,
    options: {
      appendScript: require.resolve(`src/custom-sw-code.js`),
    },
  },
  ]

  
  
  src/custom-sw-code.js

  // show a notification after 15 seconds (the notification
  // permission must be granted first)
  setTimeout(() => {
  self.registration.showNotification("Hello, world!")
  }, 15000)
  
  // register a custom navigation route
  const customRoute = new workbox.routing.NavigationRoute(({ event }) => {
  // ...
  })
  workbox.routing.registerRoute(customRoute)

• debug specifies whether Workbox should show debugging output in the browser console at runtime. When undefined, defaults to showing debug messages on localhost only.

• workboxConfig allows you to override the default Workbox options - see Overriding Workbox configuration. For example:

  gatsby-config.js

  plugins: [
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-plugin-offline`,
    options: {
      workboxConfig: {
        importWorkboxFrom: `cdn`,
      },
    },
  },
  ]

Upgrading from 2.x

To upgrade from 2.x to 3.x, move any existing options into the workboxConfig option. If you haven’t specified any options, you have nothing to do.

For example, here is a 2.x config:

plugins: [
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-plugin-offline`,
    options: {
      importWorkboxFrom: `cdn`,
    },
  },
]

Here is the equivalent 3.x config:

plugins: [
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-plugin-offline`,
    options: {
      workboxConfig: {
        importWorkboxFrom: `cdn`,
      },
    },
  },
]

In version 3, Workbox is also upgraded to version 4 so you may need to update your workboxConfig if any of those changes apply to you. Please see the docs on Google Developers for more information.

Overriding Workbox configuration

When adding this plugin to your gatsby-config.js, you can use the option workboxConfig to override the default Workbox config. To see the full list of options, see this article on Google Developers.

The default workboxConfig is as follows. Note that some of these options are configured automatically, e.g. globPatterns. If you’re not sure about what all of these options mean, it’s best to leave them as-is - otherwise, you may end up causing errors on your site, causing old files to be remain cached, or even breaking offline support.

const options = {
  importWorkboxFrom: `local`,
  globDirectory: rootDir,
  globPatterns,
  modifyURLPrefix: {
    // If `pathPrefix` is configured by user, we should replace
    // the default prefix with `pathPrefix`.
    "/": `${pathPrefix}/`,
  },
  cacheId: `gatsby-plugin-offline`,
  // Don't cache-bust JS or CSS files, and anything in the static directory,
  // since these files have unique URLs and their contents will never change
  dontCacheBustURLsMatching: /(\.js$|\.css$|static\/)/,
  runtimeCaching: [
    {
      // Use cacheFirst since these don't need to be revalidated (same RegExp
      // and same reason as above)
      urlPattern: /(\.js$|\.css$|static\/)/,
      handler: `CacheFirst`,
    },
    {
      // page-data.json files are not content hashed
      urlPattern: /^https?:.*\page-data\/.*\/page-data\.json/,
      handler: `NetworkFirst`,
    },
    {
      // Add runtime caching of various other page resources
      urlPattern: /^https?:.*\.(png|jpg|jpeg|webp|svg|gif|tiff|js|woff|woff2|json|css)$/,
      handler: `StaleWhileRevalidate`,
    },
    {
      // Google Fonts CSS (doesn't end in .css so we need to specify it)
      urlPattern: /^https?:\/\/fonts\.googleapis\.com\/css/,
      handler: `StaleWhileRevalidate`,
    },
  ],
  skipWaiting: true,
  clientsClaim: true,
}

Remove

If you want to remove gatsby-plugin-offline from your site at a later point, substitute it with gatsby-plugin-remove-serviceworker to safely remove the service worker. First, install the new package:

npm install gatsby-plugin-remove-serviceworker
npm uninstall gatsby-plugin-offline

Then, update your gatsby-config.js:

 plugins: [
-  `gatsby-plugin-offline`,
+  `gatsby-plugin-remove-serviceworker`,
 ]

This will ensure that the worker is properly unregistered, instead of leaving an outdated version registered in users’ browsers.

Notes

Empty View Source and SEO

Gatsby offers great SEO capabilities and that is no different with gatsby-plugin-offline. However, you shouldn’t think that Gatsby doesn’t serve HTML tags anymore when looking at your source code in the browser (with Right click => View source). View source doesn’t represent the actual HTML data since gatsby-plugin-offline registers and loads a service worker that will cache and handle this differently. Your site is loaded from the service worker, not from its actual source (check your Network tab in the DevTools for that).

To see the HTML data that crawlers will receive, run this in your terminal:

on Windows (using powershell):

Invoke-WebRequest https://www.yourdomain.tld | Select -ExpandProperty Content

on Mac OS/Linux:

curl https://www.yourdomain.tld

Alternatively you can have a look at the /public/index.html file in your project folder.

App shell and server logs

Server logs (like from Netlify analytics) may show a large number of pageviews to a route like /offline-plugin-app-shell-fallback/index.html, this is a result of gatsby-plugin-offline adding an app shell to the page. The app shell is a minimal amount of user interface that can be cached offline for reliable performance loading on repeat visits. The shell can be loaded from the cache, and the content of the site loaded into the shell by the service worker.