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Upgrading to Gatsby v2

Gatsby has a great guide for upgrading from v1 to v2. This post describes how I upgraded this site from v1 to v2. If it reads almost identically to their official guide, it’s because their guide is awesome. if it doesn’t, their guide is still awesome.

Before I got started, I created a new branch in git where all changed would live. This branch will get merged into the master branch after this post 💪.

Terminal window
git checkout -b gatsby-v2

You no longer need the gatsby-link package. Everything that used to be there now lives in the main gatsby dependency. We will adjust our imports later to reflect this change.

Update your dependencies

Change the versions off all dependencies that contain gatsby in their name to next. You don’t have to install them via the terminal just yet, just update the versions in package.json.

For this site that meant my package.json now looked like this:

"dependencies": {
    "gatsby": "next",
    "gatsby-image": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-catch-links": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-google-analytics": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-manifest": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-netlify": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-offline": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-react-helmet": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-sharp": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-sitemap": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-styled-components": "next",
    "gatsby-plugin-typography": "next",
    "gatsby-remark-copy-linked-files": "next",
    "gatsby-remark-images": "next",
    "gatsby-remark-prismjs": "next",
    "gatsby-source-filesystem": "next",
    "gatsby-transformer-remark": "next",
    "gatsby-transformer-sharp": "next",
  }

at this point I also deleted my node-modules folder and my lockfile package-lock.json (or yarn.lock).

Install React

In v1 react and react-dom were included in the main gatsby dependency. This is no longer the case.

Terminal window
npm i react react-dom

Install peer dependencies for your Gatsby plugins

Many packages depend on other packages to function correctly. Make sure those dependencies are there. If you don’t know which packages you should install, go to the Gatsby plugin browser and look at the line of code that tells you how to install the plugin. They have a line for each package in their plugin brower that looks like this:

Terminal window
npm install --save gatsby-plugin-something optional-peer-dependency another-optional-dependency

Also if you forget to install the peer dependencies and run npm install it will warn you in the console about unmet peer dependencies.

for me that meant:

Terminal window
npm i react helmet styled-components babel-plugin-styled-components react-typography typography

Update (and move) the layout file.

children() now is no longer a function that has to be called, so remove those parentheses! Use children instead. The official docs also recommend moving the file into the components directory. My components directory already had a folder for every component, so I moved the existing file at src/layouts/index.js into it’s own folder too. It now lives at src/components/Layout/Layout.js along with the accompanying .css file it had. Don’t forget to update all places you import these files! The imports you use in the Layout.js file also have a high chace of needing edits. I could now delete the old layouts folder (since it is empty).

import theme from "../utils/theme";
import theme from "../../utils/theme";


import Header from "../components/Header/Header";
import Header from "../Header/Header";
import Footer from "../components/Footer/Footer";
import Footer from "../Footer/Footer";

Wrap all pages in that component

Ensure all pages get wrapped by that component. the 404.js file in the src/pages directory now looks like this

import React from 'react';
 import Layout from '../components/Layout/Layout'


const NotFoundPage = () => (
  <div>
  <Layout>
    <h1>NOT FOUND</h1>
    <p>You just hit a route that doesn&#39;t exist... the sadness.</p>
  </Layout>
  </div>
);


export default NotFoundPage;

Don’t forget to also do this in your src/templates/ files if you use templates!

Remember when we deleted gatsby-link from our package.json? Lets update all instances where we used gatsby-link to use gatsby instead.

import Link from 'gatsby-link'
import { Link } from 'gatsby'

Add graphql imports

In v1 you could export queries that used graphql without first importing it 😕. Gatsby would know what you meant, and everything would work. The Gatsby docs explain how it works. or worked, since graphql is no longer there in v2 without first importing it.

You should no longer export a graphql query without first importing graphql in v2.

import { graphql } from "gatsby";

Adding this allowed me to remove the

// eslint-disable-next-line

I talked about in my automagically-lint blogpost

Rename boundActionCreators to actions

Rename boundActionCreators to actions, you will probably find this in your gatsby-node.js file.

Rename image queries

The image queries sizes and resolutions were renamed to fluid and fixed respectively.

That means I updated a few of my graphql queries:

frontmatter {
    cover {
      childImageSharp {
     sizes {
     fluid {
        ...GatsbyImageSharpSizes_withWebp
        ...GatsbyImageSharpFluid_withWebp
        }
      }
    }
  }

But don’t remove sizes at the lowest level of your query!

frontmatter {
    cover {
        childImageSharp {
            fluid {
                base64
                aspectRatio
                src
                srcSet
                srcWebp
                srcSetWebp
                sizes
            }
        }
    }
}

Use the same method importing/exporting

A single file should use only ES6 modules (import syntax) or only CommonJS (require syntax), not a mix of both.

The only place I had to change any code was in my Layout.js file, where I required some fonts.

require('typeface-roboto');
import 'typeface-roboto';
require('typeface-roboto-slab');
import 'typeface-roboto-slab';

Make remaining necessary changes

I hit a snag because this site uses typography. scale and rhythm weren’t explicity exported.

const typography = new Typography(oceanBeachTheme);
 const { rhythm, scale } = typography;


 export default typography
 export { rhythm, scale, typography as default };

edit: Made a PR that adds this info to the official migration guide and it got accepted 🎉🎉🎉!

This post didn’t mention lots of other changes that this site didn’t need, but are covered in the official documentation, please go check it out!

Turn it on

  1. delete the .cache and public directories
  2. install all your dependencies: npm i or yarn depending on your preference.
  3. run gatsby develop
  4. cross your fingers
  5. celebrate 🎉🎉🎉

Congratulations, your blazingly fast website is now even faster than before! 🔥🔥🔥 You can also use a bunch of great new features.