After months of anticipation, GatsbyConf 2022 is finally here! The team here at Gatsby has been working hard on a number of exciting new product features and improvements over the last few months, and we’re thrilled to finally share them with you all. Additionally, we wanted to share some news from around the Gatsby community, so make sure to read through to the end to hear about that as well.
New Gatsby Product Announcements
Image CDN (Public Beta)
One of the new Gatsby Cloud features we’re most excited about is Image CDN, an extension of our existing edge network that provides image optimization. More specifically, Image CDN integrates with source plugins to optimize images and store them in a cache to be served through a proxy that drastically reduces the performance impact of serving images through a CDN. Gatsby Senior Product Manager Jack Sellwood (@sellwood_jack) explains Image CDN in more detail in his blog post entitled Image CDN: Lightning Fast Image Processing for Gatsby Cloud, and you can also find more information on our new Image CDN product page. Image CDN for Gatsby Cloud is now available in public beta form for Contentful and WordPress users and will hit general availability soon.
Incremental Deploys (Public Beta)
Another big feature we’re excited to announce is Incremental Deploys, which is now available in public beta.. Incremental Deploys allows your dev team to make even faster content updates by enabling Gatsby Cloud to determine the fastest, most optimal way to get content changes in front of the right people. Incremental Deploys won’t require any setup or additional configuration, as Gatsby Cloud will handle the work for you. For more information, check out the Incremental Deploys product page.
CMS Homepage Starters
One of the leading uses for Gatsby is as a front-end solution for headless content management systems (CMS). To better support our customers and partners who use Gatsby with a headless CMS, we’ve created several beautifully-designed homepage starters that can get developers up and running quickly with leading CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Contentful. You can find out more on our CMS homepage starter product page, and we’ll have more detailed information coming soon.
TypeScript Support
The Gatsby Framework and Gatsby Cloud now fully support TypeScript! Our focus on this update is adding TypeScript support and making your installation and startup experience with Gatsby and TypeScript as straightforward and painless as possible.
Gatsby uses Parcel for transpiling TypeScript down to JavaScript, which makes it easier for developers to incorporate emergent JavaScript features into their projects without dealing with compatibility headaches down the road. Check out our blog post on Getting Started with TypeScript and Gatsby and our How-to Guide for using Gatsby with TypeScript for more information, and you can also review a public RFC that has more details on using TypeScript with Gatsby, and offers additional ideas for further improving the experience.
On-Premises GitHub
If you have an enterprise account with Gatsby Cloud, we now allow users to source sites on Gatsby Cloud from self-hosted Git connectors . For various reasons—often related to governance or security—many enterprise organizations need to use a private, self-hosted instance of GitHub called GitHub Enterprise. The On-premises GitHub Connection that we’re announcing at GatsbyConf lets you connect your self-hosted instance of GitHub Enterprise to Gatsby Cloud the same way you’d connect a repository hosted on GitHub.com.
Private IP Addresses
Enterprise customers will now have the option to use a private cluster of static IP addresses to identify and whitelist traffic coming from Gatsby Cloud.
This is a helpful security feature for businesses who maintain private package registries that Gatsby Cloud needs to pull from in order to build their site. It’s also helpful for businesses who have a CMS that is on-premises or privately hosted behind a firewall.
Having access to static IP addresses allows these businesses to create security rules on their end that explicitly allow network requests coming from Gatsby Cloud.
- Related: Interested in Self-hosted GitHub or Private IP addresses? Contact sales to take the next step.
Geo and Language-Based Redirects
We’re constantly looking at new ways to add additional support for multilingual sites, and we now have implemented the ability to include redirects that take into account geographic and language-based redirects in the Gatsby Framework and Gatsby Cloud. Developers can now code redirects that acknowledge language and country headers. For more information on redirects, refer to our How-to guide on working with redirects and rewrites.
Reverse Proxy
A reverse proxy is a type of server that receives requests from a client (e.g. a web browser) and forwards those requests to external systems on behalf of the client. The resources returned (e.g. webpages, API data) are then presented back to the client as though they came from the proxy server itself and not the external system.
Gatsby Cloud users can now set up rules that forward specified traffic to other resources while still maintaining a seamless experience for visitors by making it appear that the external resources are part of the same Gatsby Site. Among other benefits, having this level of control over how requests are routed can help a business transition to Gatsby Cloud more easily because it means that they don’t have to re-engineer their entire site at once. They can start with critical pages and write rules to serve their legacy content from its current home until they’re able to migrate those pages to Gatsby. For more information on Reverse Proxy, refer to the Rewrites/Reverse Proxies section in our How-to guide on working with redirects and rewrites.
Trailing Slashes
One of the most consistently annoying problems with Jamstack projects are issues with trailing slashes. We’ve now solved this issue with updates to the Gatsby Framework and Gatsby Cloud to eliminate duplicate content warnings and improve search engine optimization (SEO) for Gatsby websites.
Here’s why our new approach to trailing slashes will have a positive impact on SEO and site analytics reporting: Search engine crawlers and analytics tools may treat a single URL like two separate resources because some traffic includes a trailing slash and other traffic does not. This creates all sorts of headaches for folks who have to crunch the numbers.
To prevent the ill effects of this inconsistency, Gatsby is introducing a new configuration option that lets developers specify how they want to handle trailing slashes on their site. They can tell Gatsby to:
- Always add a trailing slash to the URL
- Always remove trailing slashes from the URL
- Leave the URL alone
For more information on our Trailing Slash improvements, see the Trailing Slash section in our Gatsby Config API reference guide.
Gatsby Best of 2021 Agency Award Winners
We already know that people who work with Gatsby are among the best web developers and designers on the planet, so we wanted to do a little something to recognize and celebrate the great work that web agencies—of all sizes!—do with Gatsby. We’re delighted to announce the winners in our first-ever Gatsby Best of 2021 Agency Awards, a new awards program designed to recognize the best Gatsby partner agencies and the best Gatsby websites created by those agencies.
We’ll be announcing the winners of the first annual Gatsby Best of 2021 Agency Awards on the morning of Thursday, March 3rd, at 9:30am MST.