gatsby-dev-cli

A command-line tool for local Gatsby development. When doing development work on Gatsby core, this tool allows you to copy the changes to the various Gatsby packages to Gatsby sites that you're testing your changes on.

Install

npm install -g gatsby-dev-cli

Configuration / First time setup

The gatsby-dev-cli tool needs to know where your cloned Gatsby repository is located. You typically only need to configure this once.

gatsby-dev --set-path-to-repo /path/to/my/cloned/version/gatsby

How to use

Navigate to the project you want to link to your forked Gatsby repository and run:

gatsby-dev

The tool will then scan your project's package.json to find its Gatsby dependencies and copy the latest source from your cloned version of Gatsby into your project's node_modules folder. A watch task is then created to re-copy any modules that might change while you're working on the code, so you can leave this program running.

Typically you'll also want to run npm run watch in the Gatsby repo to set up watchers to build Gatsby source code.

Revert to current packages

If you've recently run gatsby-dev your node_modules will be out of sync with currently published packages. In order to undo this, you can remove the node_modules directory or run:

git checkout package.json; yarn --force

or

git checkout package.json; npm install --force

Demo Video

More detailed instructions for setting up your Gatsby development environment can be found here.

Other commands

--packages

You can prevent the automatic dependencies scan and instead specify a list of packages you want to link by using the --packages option:

gatsby-dev --packages gatsby gatsby-transformer-remark

--scan-once

With this flag, the tool will do an initial scan and copy and then quit. This is useful for setting up automated testing/builds of Gatsby sites from the latest code. Gatsby's CI is using this for its tests.

--quiet

Don't output anything except for a success message when used together with --scan-once.

--copy-all

Copy all modules/files in the gatsby source repo in packages/

--force-install

Disable copying files into node_modules and force usage of local npm repository.

--external-registry

Run yarn add commands without the --registry flag. This is helpful when using yarn 2/3 and you need to use yarn config set npmRegistryServer http://localhost:4873 and echo -e 'unsafeHttpWhitelist:\n - "localhost"' >> .yarnrc.yml before running gatsby-dev-cli.