The Drupal community has taken to GatsbyJS, the React framework that lets you easily build static (and more) websites (or applications.) And, honestly, this makes a lot of sense. Drupal is a great content management system and it even has ways to create microsites within one installation (thanks to techniques like the Domain module.)

My first experience with GatsbyJS was in preparing a demonstration of decoupled Drupal Commerce for Decoupled Days 2018. I had copied the Umami demo someone had written and got it working with Drupal Commerce. In fact, it is still up and running here: https://gatsbyjs.demo.centarro.io/product/drupal-commerce-hoodie. The code is also available on GitHub. Back then I had to fork the Drupal source plugin to make things work. The JSON:API module was still a contributed module, and some spec implementation improvements had broken the plugin.

Since that time, my work at Centarro has been doubling down on the API-First capabilities of Drupal Commerce and the developer experience of JSON:API (Supporting cross-bundle entity collections in JSON:API, Querying Drupal Search API indexes using JSON:API.)

The community has also grown in its usage of GatsbyJS. I'm hoping to get back into the arena and see what can be done with GatsbyJS and Drupal Commerce for a decoupled storefront.

This past week I had a discussion with Shane Thomas about Drupal Commerce and GatsbyJS. I used this opportunity to review the documentation for GatsbyJS themes. Themes are composable, which means they can provide components and templates used in your GatsbyJS site. Perhaps this allows a prebuilt product template and add to cart component that "just works" with the Drupal Commerce data model 🤔? Time will tell.

Lee Rowlands pinged me while he was at Drupal South and I was spending Thanksgiving at my parent's house. He asked about some of our recent API initiatives work for Drupal Commerce and how he may lend a hand. I didn't have much for an answer, as we're in discovery / make a mess mode. There is a Gatsby-ECommerce plugin that works with Moltin, an API-First eCommerce SaaS. He's experimenting plugging Drupal Commerce into that plugin. 🥳I hope to sync with him and see how that's going.

I'll be reading up on the following blogs as well to bring myself up to speed on Drupal + GatsbyJS

• GatsbyJS + Drupal: Create Content Type Landing Pages
• GatsbyJS + Drupal: Create Custom GraphQL Schema for Empty Fields
• Using Drupal Blocks in a Decoupled GatsbyJS Application
• All of Shane's Gatsby posts on CodeKarate