Gatsby 5 came out last Tuesday and I’ve just completed the upgrade of my blog from Gatsby 4 to Gatsby 5. In the past, this process had been painful and I was left pulling out my hair (something I can’t afford to do — male pattern baldness is real!).
You can see the results at https://xavie.mirmon.co.uk. If you are curious about the benefits of upgrading to Gatsby 5 check out my other blog post about Gatsby 5’s enhancements. However, this experience was much simpler than I expected. The upgrade guide is extensive and helped walk me through the different steps required to upgrade. Fortunately for me, I have built my site on top of gatsby-theme-jodie built by a Gatsby core maintainer LekoArts. This theme was already ready for Gatsby 5, so I only needed to update any customisations I’d made through shadowing.A note on Gatsby Themes
The more I work with Gatsby Themes and shadowing, the more I learn the intricate differences to the likes of contributed plugins/modules on CMS.’ Because we are essentially using Webpack to overlay files on top of one another the process of upgrading can look very different for you. I’ve found that there is extra effort required to update the shadowed files when an underlying file has changed compared to that of Drupal or WordPress. I was fortunate that the theme I use was updated quickly. However, your specific theme’s maintainer might take longer to push out an update so mileage may vary.
New Feature! Medium teasers
Because this process was so quick, I decided to add a new feature which shows a grid of Medium articles on the homepage. This was built using gatsby-source-medium and the new useStaticQuery hooks approach.
I also used IFTTT to trigger my Gatsby Cloud builds when I publish a new article. 🔥🔥🔥🔥