Refreshing Content

During local development, it can be useful to refresh sourced content without restarting the development server. To facilitate this, Gatsby exposes an environment variable called ENABLE_GATSBY_REFRESH_ENDPOINT.

If set to true, this will expose a /__refresh webhook that can receive POST requests to refresh the sourced content. This exposed webhook can be triggered whenever remote data changes.

You can trigger this endpoint locally, for example, on Unix-based operating systems (like Ubuntu and macOS) using curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/__refresh.

Additionally, the sourced content can also be refreshed with the “Refresh Data” button in the GraphiQL explorer. This button is only visible if ENABLE_GATSBY_REFRESH_ENDPOINT is set to true.

Securing the refresh endpoint is possible by supplying a value for the environmental variable GATSBY_REFRESH_TOKEN, which will cause Gatsby to only accept requests with a matching authorization header. For example GATSBY_REFRESH_TOKEN=12345 would require a request with header: authorization: 12345.