Code Contributions

The beauty of contributing to open source is that you can clone your favorite project, get it running locally, and test out experiments and changes in real time! Way to feel like a wizard.

On this page:

• Repo setup
• Creating your own plugins and loaders
• Making changes to the starter Library
• Using Docker to set up test environments
• Development tools

Repo setup

This page includes details specific to the Gatsby core and ecosystem codebase.

To start setting up the Gatsby repo on your machine using git, Yarn and Gatsby-CLI, check out the page on setting up your local dev environment.

To contribute to the blog or Gatsbyjs.org website, check out the setup steps on the blog and website contributions page. For instructions on contributing to the docs, visit the docs contributions page.

Creating your own plugins and loaders

If you create a loader or plugin, we would love for you to open source it and put it on npm. For more information on creating custom plugins, please see the documentation for plugins and the API specification.

Making changes to the starter library

Note: You don’t need to follow these steps to submit to the starter library. This is only necessary if you’d like to contribute to the functionality of the starter library. To submit a starter, follow these steps instead.

To develop on the starter library, you’ll need to supply a GitHub personal access token.

1. Create a personal access token in your GitHub Developer settings.
2. In the new token’s settings, grant that token the “public_repo” scope.
3. Create a file in the root of www called .env.development, and add the token to that file like so:

GITHUB_API_TOKEN=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE

The .env.development file is ignored by git. Your token should never be committed.

Using Docker to set up test environments

With all of the possible Gatsby integrations, it might help to spin up a Docker container with the software application you need to test. This makes installation a breeze, so you can focus less on getting set up and more on the integration details that matter to you.

Do you have a setup not listed here? Let us know by adding it to this file and opening a PR.

Docker, Wordpress and Gatsby

To install Wordpress to use with Gatsby, this docker-compose.yml file will come in handy:

version: '2'

services:
  db:
    image: mysql:5.6
    container_name: sessions_db
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    volumes:
      - "./.data/db:/var/lib/mysql"
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: wordpress
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
      MYSQL_USER: wordpress
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress

  wordpress:
    image: wordpress:latest
    container_name: sessions_wordpress
    depends_on:
      - db
    links:
      - db
    ports:
      - "7000:80"
    restart: always
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress
    volumes:
    - ./wp-content:/var/www/html/wp-content
    - ./wp-app:/var/www/html

  phpmyadmin:
      image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
      container_name: sessions_phpmyadmin
      environment:
       - PMA_ARBITRARY=1
       - PMA_HOST=sessions_db
       - PMA_USER=wordpress
       - PMA_PASSWORD=wordpress
      restart: always
      ports:
       - 8080:80
      volumes:
       - /sessions

Use the above file contents when following the Docker Wordpress install instructions: https://docs.docker.com/compose/wordpress/

Using Docker Compose, you can start and stop a Wordpress instance and integrate it with the Gatsby Wordpress source plugin.

Development tools

Debugging the build process

Check Debugging the build process page to learn how to debug Gatsby.