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gatsby-source-contentful

Source plugin for pulling content types, entries, and assets into Gatsby from Contentful spaces. It creates links between entry types and asset so they can be queried in Gatsby using GraphQL.

An example site for using this plugin is at https://using-contentful.gatsbyjs.org/

Install

npm install --save gatsby-source-contentful

How to use

First, you need a way to pass environment variables to the build process, so secrets and other secured data aren’t committed to source control. We recommend using dotenv which will then expose environment variables. Read more about dotenv and using environment variables here. Then we can use these environment variables and configure our plugin.

Using Delivery API

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_space_id`,
        // Learn about environment variables: https://gatsby.dev/env-vars
        accessToken: process.env.CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
      },
    },
  ],
}

Using Preview API

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_space_id`,
        // Learn about environment variables: https://gatsby.dev/env-vars
        accessToken: process.env.CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
        host: `preview.contentful.com`,
      },
    },
  ],
}

Download assets for static distribution

Downloads and caches Contentful Assets to the local filesystem. Useful for reduced data usage in development or projects where you want the assets copied locally with builds for deploying without links to Contentful’s CDN.

Enable this feature with the downloadLocal: true option.

// In your gatsby-config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `your_space_id`,
        // Learn about environment variables: https://gatsby.app/env-vars
        accessToken: process.env.CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN,
        downloadLocal: true,
      },
    },
  ],
}

Query a ContentfulAsset’s localFile field in GraphQL to gain access to the common fields of the gatsby-source-filesystem File node. This is not a Contentful node, so usage for gatsby-image is different:

  query MyQuery {
    # Example is for a `ContentType` with a `ContentfulAsset` field
    # You could also query an asset directly via
    # `allContentfulAsset { edges{ node { } } }`
    # or `contentfulAsset(contentful_id: { eq: "contentful_id here" } ) { }`
    contentfulMyContentType {
      myContentfulAssetField {
        # Direct URL to Contentful CDN for this asset
        file { url }

        # Query for a fluid image resource on this `ContentfulAsset` node
        fluid(maxWidth: 500){
          ...GatsbyContentfulFluid_withWebp
        }

        # Query for locally stored file(e.g. An image) - `File` node
        localFile {
          # Where the asset is downloaded into cache, don't use this
          absolutePath
          # Where the asset is copied to for distribution, equivalent to using ContentfulAsset `file {url}`
          publicURL
          # Use `gatsby-image` to create fluid image resource
          childImageSharp {
            fluid(maxWidth: 500) {
              ...GatsbyImageSharpFluid
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }

Note: This feature downloads any file from a ContentfulAsset node that gatsby-source-contentful provides. They are all copied over from ./cache/gatsby-source-filesystem/ to the sites build location ./public/static/.

For any troubleshooting related to this feature, first try clearing your ./cache/ directory. gatsby-source-contentful will acquire fresh data, and all ContentfulAssets will be downloaded and cached again.

Offline

If you don’t have internet connection you can add export GATSBY_CONTENTFUL_OFFLINE=true to tell the plugin to fallback to the cached data, if there is any.

Configuration options

spaceId [string][required]

Contentful spaceId

accessToken [string][required]

Contentful delivery api key, when using the Preview API use your Preview API key

host [string][optional] [default: 'cdn.contentful.com']

The base host for all the API requests, by default it’s ‘cdn.contentful.com’, if you want to use the Preview API set it to 'preview.contentful.com'. You can use your own host for debugging/testing purposes as long as you respect the same Contentful JSON structure.

environment [string][optional] [default: ‘master’]

The environment to pull the content from, for more info on environments check out this Guide.

downloadLocal [boolean][optional] [default: false]

Downloads and caches ContentfulAsset’s to the local filesystem. Allows you to query a ContentfulAsset’s localFile field, which is not linked to Contentful’s CDN. Useful for reducing data usage.

You can pass in any other options available in the contentful.js SDK.

localeFilter [function][optional] [default: () => true]

Possibility to limit how many locales/nodes are created in graphQL. This can limit the memory usage by reducing the amount of nodes created. Useful if you have a large space in contentful and only want to get the data from one selected locale.

For example, to filter locales on only germany localeFilter: locale => locale.code === 'de-DE'

List of locales and their codes can be found in Contentful app -> Settings -> Locales

forceFullSync [boolean][optional] [default: false]

Prevents the use of sync tokens when accessing the Contentful API.

proxy [object][optional] [default: undefined]

Axios proxy configuration. See the axios request config documentation for further information about the supported values.

useNameForId [boolean][optional] [default: true]

Use the content’s name when generating the GraphQL schema e.g. a Content Type called [Component] Navigation bar will be named contentfulComponentNavigationBar.

When set to false, the content’s internal ID will be used instead e.g. a Content Type with the ID navigationBar will be called contentfulNavigationBar.

Using the ID is a much more stable property to work with as it will change less often. However, in some scenarios, Content Types’ IDs will be auto-generated (e.g. when creating a new Content Type without specifying an ID) which means the name in the GraphQL schema will be something like contentfulC6XwpTaSiiI2Ak2Ww0oi6qa. This won’t change and will still function perfectly as a valid field name but it is obviously pretty ugly to work with.

If you are confident your Content Types will have natural-language IDs (e.g. blogPost), then you should set this option to false. If you are unable to ensure this, then you should leave this option set to true (the default).

pageLimit [number][optional] [default: 1000]

Number of entries to retrieve from Contentful at a time. This can be adjusted to fix issues related to “Response size too big” error.

Notes on Contentful Content Models

There are currently some things to keep in mind when building your content models at Contentful.

  1. At the moment, fields that do not have at least one populated instance will not be created in the GraphQL schema.
  2. When using reference fields, be aware that this source plugin will automatically create the reverse reference. You do not need to create references on both content types.

How to query for nodes

Two standard node types are available from Contentful: Asset and ContentType.

Asset nodes will be created in your site’s GraphQL schema under contentfulAsset and allContentfulAsset.

ContentType nodes are a little different - their exact name depends on what you called them in your Contentful data models. The nodes will be created in your site’s GraphQL schema under contentful${entryTypeName} and allContentful${entryTypeName}.

In all cases querying for nodes like contentfulX will return a single node, and nodes like allContentfulX will return all nodes of that type.

Query for all nodes

You might query for all of a type of node:

{
  allContentfulAsset {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        file {
          url
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

You might do this in your gatsby-node.js using Gatsby’s createPages Node API.

Query for a single node

To query for a single image asset with the title ‘foo’ and a width of 1600px:

export const assetQuery = graphql`
  {
    contentfulAsset(filter: { title: { eq: 'foo' } }) {
      image {
        resolutions(width: 1600) {
          width
          height
          src
          srcSet
        }
      }
    }
  }
`

To query for a single CaseStudy node with the short text properties title and subtitle:

  {
    contentfulCaseStudy(filter: { title: { eq: 'bar' } })  {
      title
      subtitle
    }
  }

Note the use of GraphQL arguments on the contentfulAsset and resolutions fields. See Gatsby’s GraphQL reference docs for more info.

You might query for a single node inside a component in your src/components folder, using Gatsby’s StaticQuery component.

A note about LongText fields

On Contentful, a “Long text” field uses Markdown by default. The field is exposed as an object, while the raw Markdown is exposed as a child node.

{
  contentfulCaseStudy {
    body {
      body
    }
  }
}

Unless the text is Markdown-free, you cannot use the returned value directly. In order to handle the Markdown content, you must use a transformer plugin such as gatsby-transformer-remark. The transformer will create a childMarkdownRemark on the “Long text” field and expose the generated html as a child node:

{
  contentfulCaseStudy {
    body {
      childMarkdownRemark {
        html
      }
    }
  }
}

You can then insert the returned HTML inline in your JSX:

  <div
  className="body"
  dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{
       __html: data.contentfulCaseStudy.body.childMarkdownRemark.html,
     }}
   />

Duplicated entries

When Contentful pulls the data, all localizations will be pulled. Therefore, if you have a localization active, it will duplicate the entries. Narrow the search by filtering the query with node_locale filter:

{
  allContentfulCaseStudy(filter: { node_locale: { eq: "en-US" } }) {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        slug
        title
        subtitle
        body {
          body
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Query for Assets in ContentType nodes

More typically your Asset nodes will be mixed inside of your ContentType nodes, so you’ll query them together. All the same formatting rules for Asset and ContentType nodes apply.

To get all the CaseStudy nodes with ShortText fields id, slug, title, subtitle, LongText field body and heroImage Asset field, we use allContentful${entryTypeName} to return all instances of that ContentType:

{
  allContentfulCaseStudy {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        slug
        title
        subtitle
        body {
          body
        }
        heroImage {
          fixed(width: 1600) {
            width
            height
            src
            srcSet
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

When querying images you can use the fixed, fluid or resize nodes to get different sizes for the image (for example for using gatsby-image). Their usage is documented at the gatsby-plugin-sharp package. The only difference is that gatsby-source-contentful also allows setting only the width parameter for these node types, the height will then automatically be calculated according to the aspect ratio.

More on Queries with Contentful and Gatsby

It is strongly recommended that you take a look at how data flows in a real Contentful and Gatsby application to fully understand how the queries, Node.js functions and React components all come together. Check out the example site at using-contentful.gatsbyjs.org.

Contentful Rich Text

Rich Text feature is supported in this source plugin, you can use the following query to get the json output:

{
  allContentfulBlogPost {
    edges {
      node {
        bodyRichText {
          json
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

To define a way Rich Text document is rendered, you can use @contentful/rich-text-react-renderer package:

import { BLOCKS, MARKS } from "@contentful/rich-text-types"
import { documentToReactComponents } from "@contentful/rich-text-react-renderer"

const Bold = ({ children }) => <span className="bold">{children}</span>
const Text = ({ children }) => <p className="align-center">{children}</p>

const options = {
  renderMark: {
    [MARKS.BOLD]: text => <Bold>{text}</Bold>,
  },
  renderNode: {
    [BLOCKS.PARAGRAPH]: (node, children) => <Text>{children}</Text>,
  },
}

documentToReactComponents(node.bodyRichText.json, options)

Check out the examples at @contentful/rich-text-react-renderer.

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