Build & Deploy

Before deployment, the project must be compiled and bundled by GatsbyJS. This produces a set of optimized static files that may be hosted on a static web server or (in our case) on GitHub pages. Note that the npm run develop command only spawns a development server, which lacks the appropriate optimizations for hosting to the public. Consequently, we use the gatsby build command:

npm run build

This will generate the static files for the site. The bundler will also momentarily spawn a server on localhost:3000 to display webpack bundling information - it is safe to ignore/close this page. Once the build process is complete, you can host the site with the following command:

npm run serve

This will launch the site on the following URL: http://localhost:9000. Whilst this is an adequate production build, we recommend hosting the bundled site files using a dedicated web server such as Apache or nginx. We also highly recommend using GitHub pages, which allows you to host on GitHub for free (with a custom domain).