The Gatsby ecosystem is prosperous with plugins and themes, which I love…But sometimes all this abundance can actually become a problem. For example, when trying to identify and assemble all the pieces needed to achieve your goals for a new project.

Proper documentation helps to solve this but it is hard to keep docs always up to date. Also, this approach often means simply copy-pasting commands into your terminal without understanding what they do. The process becomes a bit tedious.

Instead, wouldn’t it be nice if you could make the setup instructions more interactive and automated? Where people can read through, learn how it all works, and set up their projects at the same time?

Enter: Gatsby Recipes

Gatsby Recipes launched just recently to help automate everyday tasks like creating pages and layouts, installing and setting up plugins, adding a blog to a site, setting up Typescript, and many more routine tasks. With the release of this new feature, which is run from the CLI, Gatsby has created 25+ official recipes that you can explore, including Theme UI, Sass, Cypress, animated page transitions, and persistent layout components. And since then, because they are so useful but also fun and easy to create, the community has also been busy contributing all kinds of other useful Recipes.

Gatsby, Before Recipes: A long and winding workflow
For a few years now, my go-to stack when building apps has been Gatsby as my primary framework, TailwindCSS for styling, and Contentful as the data source. (I know that there are many other styling options out there, styled-components is a great one, but I personally like to keep my CSS as low level as possible).

Even if this setup looks straightforward, I always struggle the first 20 minutes fiddling around with config files and plugins to get TailwindCSS working properly. No matter how many times I’ve used this workflow, I still forget how I did it last time or manage to miss one small step.

#gatsby