Build your first Gatsby site

Gatsby CLI

To get started on your first Gatsby site you need to be somewhat comfortable using the command line and have Node and Git installed. The Gatsby CLI tool lets you quickly create new Gatsby-powered sites and run commands for developing Gatsby sites. It is a published npm package.

The Gatsby CLI is available via npm and should be installed globally by running

npm install -g gatsby-cli

To see the commands available to you with the Gatsby CLI, run gatsby --help

Gatsby starters

Now you are ready to use the Gatsby CLI tool to create your first Gatsby site. Using the tool, you can download what are called “starters” (out of the box partially built sites with some default configuration) to help you get moving faster on creating a certain type of site. The gatsby-starter-default starter you’ll be using here is a starter with the bare essentials needed for a Gatsby site.

Install this starter anywhere in your file system by running the following in your command line:

gatsby new my-gatsby-site https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-default

Then navigate into the newly created directory

cd my-gatsby-site

And finally running the develop command to fire up your new gatsby site

gatsby develop

View your site locally:

Open up a new tab in your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8000.

BAM! You’ve just created your first Gatsby site! 🌮

Other things you can do with Gatsby CLI

Create a Production build

To build a production-ready build you can run

gatsby build

• Gatsby will perform an optimized production build for your site, generating static HTML and per-route JavaScript code bundles.

Serve the production build locally

If you would like to see a replica of the production site running locally, run

gatsby serve

Gatsby starts a local HTML server for testing your built site. Remember to build your site using gatsby build before using this command.