Your gatsby website served by docker

You have a gatsby website but your dependencies are getting out of hands? Gatsby as a docker container can be the solution and this short tutorial will show you how.

Prepare your workspace

First, let's assume your gatsby website is currently inside folder on your machine. For the sake of the example let's take a popular starter kit.

git clone https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-default.git ~/home
cd ~/home

now your gatsby project is located in the ´~/home´ directory.

Let's wrap it with a container.

Create a ´Dockerfile´ with the following content

FROM node:20.16.0-slim

WORKDIR /app

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y git && apt-get clean

# Install Gatsby CLI globally
RUN npm install -g gatsby-cli && npm cache clean --force

# Install project dependencies
RUN yarn install
RUN yarn cache clean

# Copy remaining files
COPY . .

# Move setup script and make it executable
COPY setup.sh /usr/local/bin/setup.sh
RUN chmod +x /usr/local/bin/setup.sh

# Expose the Gatsby development server port
EXPOSE 8000

# Use CMD instead of ENTRYPOINT to allow easy overriding
CMD ["/usr/local/bin/setup.sh"]

Keep things nice and clean with a ´.dockerignore´ file with the following content

.cache/
node_modules/
public/

Create a file named ´setup.sh´ in the same folder with the content

#!/bin/bash

# Exit on error
set -e

# Ensure we are in the correct directory
cd /app

# Print available Gatsby CLI version to debug
echo "Using Gatsby version: $(gatsby --version)"

# Ensure Gatsby is installed locally
if ! yarn list --pattern "gatsby@" >/dev/null; then
    echo "Gatsby is missing in node_modules! Installing locally..."
    yarn add gatsby
fi

# Serve the Gatsby site
exec gatsby develop -H 0.0.0.0

Build your docker container

Substitute ´image-name´ with a name of your choice.

docker build -t image-name .

Run your container

Substitute ´image-name´ as done above.

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/app -p 8000:8000 image-name

Now you should be able to navigate to ´localhost:8000´ and see it running correctly.

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