Newsliner Gatsby + Ghost Starter

A starter template to build lightning fast websites with Ghost & Gatsby brought to you by Epilocal as part of the NewsCloud project to support local news.

This template was built on top of the gatsby-starter-ghost template, so much of the installation instructions will be the same.

Demo: https://newsliner-gatsby.epilocal.com/

# With Gatsby CLI
gatsby new newsliner-gatsby https://github.com/epilocal/newsliner-gatsby.git

# From Source
git clone https://github.com/epilocal/newsliner-gatsby.git
cd newsliner-gatsby

Then install dependencies

yarn

Start the development server. You now have a Gatsby site pulling content from headless Ghost.

gatsby develop

By default, the starter will populate content from a default Ghost install located at https://cloud.epilocal.com/epilocal.

To use your own install, you will need to edit the .ghost.json config file with your credentials. Change the apiUrl value to the URL of your Ghost site. For Ghost(Pro) customers, this is the Ghost URL ending in .ghost.io, and for people using the self-hosted version of Ghost, it's the same URL used to access your site.

Next, update the contentApiKey value to a key associated with the Ghost site. A key can be provided by creating an integration within Ghost Admin. Navigate to Integrations and click "Add new integration". Name the integration appropriately and click create.

Finally, configure your desired URL in siteConfig.js, so links (e. g. canonical links) are generated correctly. You can also update other default values, such as postsPerPage in this file.

To use this starter without issues, your Ghost installation needs to be at least on version 2.10.0.

The default Ghost version that is used for this starter is 3.x. If your Ghost installation is on a lower version, you will need to pass in a version property in your .ghost.json settings:

Ghost >=2.10.0 <3.0.0

{
    "apiUrl": "https://gatsby.ghost.io",
    "contentApiKey": "9cc5c67c358edfdd81455149d0",
    "version": "v2"
}

Ghost >=3.0.0

{
    "apiUrl": "https://gatsby.ghost.io",
    "contentApiKey": "9cc5c67c358edfdd81455149d0"
}

The starter contains three config files specifically for deploying with Netlify. A netlify.toml file for build settings, a /static/_headers file with default security headers set for all routes, and /static/_redirects to set Netlify custom domain redirects.

To deploy to your Netlify account, hit the button below.

Content API Keys are generally not considered to be sensitive information, they exist so that they can be changed in the event of abuse; so most people commit it directly to their .ghost.json config file. If you prefer to keep this information out of your repository you can remove this config and set Netlify ENV variables for production builds instead.

This template uses a Netlify serverless function to add email subscribers to your Ghost instance via the Ghost Admin API. If you want to use this feature, you will need to add the API URL and your Ghost Admin API Key as Netlify ENV variables.

Once deployed, you can set up a Ghost + Netlify Integration to use deploy hooks from Ghost to trigger Netlify rebuilds. That way, any time data changes in Ghost, your site will rebuild on Netlify.

You can disable the default Ghost Handlebars Theme front-end by enabling the Make this site private flag within your Ghost settings. This enables password protection in front of the Ghost install and sets <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> so your Gatsby front-end becomes the source of truth for SEO.

# Run a production build, locally
gatsby build

# Serve a production build, locally
gatsby serve

Gatsby develop uses the development config in .ghost.json - while Gatsby build uses the production config.

Copyright (c) 2021 Epilocal - Released under the MIT license.