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gatsby-transformer-yaml-plus

A Gatsby transformer plugin to parse YAML files, with some extra goodies.

This plugin is based off of gatsby-transformer-yaml, and like gatsby-transformer-yaml, this plugin can:

  • convert a yaml file object into a node
  • convert an array of objects in a yaml file, each into their own node
  • supports both .yaml and .yml extensions (anything with a mediaType of text/yaml)

Currently, the main benefits of gatsby-transformer-yaml-plus over gatsby-transformer-yaml are:

  • Optional Markdown rendering

Installation

npm i gatsby-transformer-yaml-plus

You also need to install gatsby-source-filesystem, if it is not already:

npm i gatsby-source-filesystem

Usage

gatsby-config.js

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-transformer-yaml-plus`,
      options: {
        enableRemark: true,
        markdownPreface: 'md//',
      }
    },
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
      options: {
        path: `./content/`,
      },
    },
  ],
}

The path ./content/ should contain all the YAML files you want to parse.

Markdown Support

The lack of markdown support in config-like files such as YAML has been an ongoing topic of discussion in the Gatsby community. A helpful feature of gatsby-transformer-yaml-plus is that it can optionally crawl through all the fields in a YAML file, and parse any fields which have a special markdownPreface identifier.

It looks like this:

title: A Good Title
description: md//This description has some **markdown** in it.

Where ‘md//’ is the preface string required to tell gatsby-transformer-yaml-plus to render that field as HTML. If you want to change this string, just set markdownPreface in the plugin options in gatsby-config.js

Structure of the Resulting Nodes

When processing your YAML files, this plugin can handle a root-level array of objects, like so:

people.yaml

- name: Meg
  age: 31
- name: Joe
  age: 17
- name: Pat
  age: 54

Or you can have root-level objects in multiple files, like so:

content/
  people/
    meg.yaml
    joe.yaml
    pat.yaml

meg.yaml

name: Meg
age: 31

joe.yaml

name: Joe
age: 17

pat.yaml

name: Pat
age: 54

In both cases, you’d end up with the same three nodes:

[
  {
    "name": "Meg",
    "age": 31,
  },
  {
    "name": "Joe",
    "age": 17,
  },
  {
    "name": "Pat",
    "age": 54,
  }
]

Queries

Because the resulting structure of the nodes is the same if you choose to use an array of objects or files containing a single object, the GraphQL query is the same.

{
  allPeopleYaml {
    edges {
      node {
        name
        age
      }
    }
  }
}

Which gives:

{
  allPeopleYaml: {
    edges: [
      {
        node: {
          name: "Meg",
          age: 31
        },
      },
      {
        node: {
          name: "Joe",
          age: 17
        },
      },
      {
        node: {
          name: "Pat",
          age: 54
        },
      },
    ]
  }
}

Configuration Options

These are all of the plugin options which can be set in gatsby-config.js

Option Name Value Type Default
enableRemark boolean false
markdownPreface string md//
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