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How to Add Tag Links and Tag Pages to your Gatsby Site


By David Fekke
June 28th, 2021

I recently posted on how to add tags to your Gatsby site using FrontMatter. After doing that change to my blog, I also wanted to add linking as well to my posts, as well as a page that listed all Tags.

Gatsby actually has the queries and code examples you need pretty well documented. I wanted to show how I used these on my site. The Creating Tags Pages for Blog Posts documentation describes the code you will have to write in order to add the tag linking and templates to your site. The code is divided into three different areas, a tag template, an addition to the createPages function in the gatsby-node.js file and a Tags page for listing all of the tags.

Graphql queries

The Tag template will need a query to select all of the blog posts that match a particular tag. This parameter for the Tag gets passed into template through the context. We can test using the graphiql editor that comes with Gatsby, and can be browsed to at 'http://localhost:8000/___graphql'.

{
    allMarkdownRemark(
      limit: 2000
      sort: { fields: [frontmatter___date], order: DESC }
      filter: { frontmatter: { tags: { in: "JavaScript" } } }
    ) {
      totalCount
      edges {
        node {
          fields {
            slug
          }
          frontmatter {
            title
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }

In the example above, we searched for any post that had a tag named 'JavaScript'. We can then make this a query dynamic by setting it up to use a query parameter passed from the template context. Here is how that query would look.

export const pageQuery = graphql`
  query($tag: String) {
    allMarkdownRemark(
      limit: 2000
      sort: { fields: [frontmatter___date], order: DESC }
      filter: { frontmatter: { tags: { in: [$tag] } } }
    ) {
      totalCount
      edges {
        node {
          fields {
            slug
          }
          frontmatter {
            title
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
`

Here is how my tag template looks with this query.

import React from "react"
import { Link, graphql } from "gatsby"
import Layout from "../components/layout"
import Navbar from "../components/navbar.js"
import Header from "../components/blogheader.js"
import Footer from "../components/footer.js"
import Article from "../components/article.js"
import MainHelmet from "../components/mainhelmet.js"

const TagList = ({ pageContext, data }) => {
    const { tag } = pageContext
    const { edges, totalCount } = data.allMarkdownRemark
    const tagHeader = `${totalCount} post${
        totalCount === 1 ? "" : "s"
    } tagged with "${tag}"`;

    return (
        <Layout>
            <MainHelmet title="Fek.io" />
            <Navbar />
            <Header headline={tagHeader} />
            <Article>
          <h1>{tagHeader}</h1>
          <ul>
            {edges.map(({ node }) => {
              const { slug } = node.fields
              const blogslug = `/blog${slug}`;
              const { title } = node.frontmatter
              return (
                <li key={slug}>
                  <Link to={blogslug}>{title}</Link>
                </li>
              )
            })}
          </ul>
          <Link to="/tags">All tags</Link>
          </Article>
          <Footer />
        </Layout>
    );
}

export default TagList;

export const pageQuery = graphql`
  query($tag: String) {
    allMarkdownRemark(
      limit: 2000
      sort: { fields: [frontmatter___date], order: DESC }
      filter: { frontmatter: { tags: { in: [$tag] } } }
    ) {
      totalCount
      edges {
        node {
          fields {
            slug
          }
          frontmatter {
            title
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
`;

Modifying createPages Function to use Tag Template

Now that we have created our template, we can now use the createPages function in the gatesby-node.js file to create our tag pages. If you already have a blog, you probably are already using the createPages function to create your blog posts. I modified my existing function to also use the tag template.

The first thing I did was modify the graphql query to also query for tags. The original query I had only queried for blog posts.

{
posts: allMarkdownRemark(
    sort: { fields: [frontmatter___date], order: DESC }
    limit: 1000
) {
    edges {
        node {
            fields {
                slug
            }
            frontmatter {
                title
                category
            }
        }
    }
}
}

I modified this query to also include all of my tags.

{
posts: allMarkdownRemark(
    sort: { fields: [frontmatter___date], order: DESC }
    limit: 1000
) {
    edges {
        node {
            fields {
                slug
            }
            frontmatter {
                title
                category
            }
        }
    }
}
tags: allMarkdownRemark(limit: 2000) {
    group(field: frontmatter___tags) {
        fieldValue
    }
}
}

Now that we have our query modified, we will need to create a page for all of the different tags. We can do this by using the createPage function that is injected into our createPages function.

const tagTemplate = path.resolve('src/templates/tags-list-template.js');

const tags = result.data.tags.group
// Make tag pages
tags.forEach(tag => {
    createPage({
    path: `/tags/${_.kebabCase(tag.fieldValue)}/`,
    component: tagTemplate,
    context: {
        tag: tag.fieldValue,
    },
    })
});

My completed createPages function looked like the following once I was done making my modifications.

exports.createPages = async ({ graphql, actions, reporter }) => {
    const { createPage } = actions;
    const postPage = path.resolve('src/templates/blog-post.js');
    const tagTemplate = path.resolve('src/templates/tags-list-template.js');

    const result = await graphql(`
      {
        posts: allMarkdownRemark(
          sort: { fields: [frontmatter___date], order: DESC }
          limit: 1000
        ) {
          edges {
            node {
              fields {
                slug
              }
              frontmatter {
                title
                category
              }
            }
          }
        }
        tags: allMarkdownRemark(limit: 2000) {
          group(field: frontmatter___tags) {
            fieldValue
          }
        }
      }
    `);
    if (result.errors) {
      console.log(result.errors);
      reporter.panicOnBuild(`Error whil running GraphQL query`);
    }

    const posts = result.data.posts.edges;
    const postsPerPage = 10;
    const numPages = Math.ceil(posts.length / postsPerPage);

    Array.from({ length: numPages }).forEach((_, i) => {
      createPage({
        path: i === 0 ? `/blog` : `/blog/${i + 1}`,
        component: path.resolve("./src/templates/blog-list-template.js"),
        context: {
          limit: postsPerPage,
          skip: i * postsPerPage,
          numPages,
          currentPage: i + 1
        }
      })
    });

    posts.forEach((edge, index) => {
      const next = index === 0 ? null : posts[index - 1].node;
      const prev = index === posts.length - 1 ? null : posts[index + 1].node;

      createPage({
        path: `blog${edge.node.fields.slug}`,
        component: postPage,
        context: {
          slug: edge.node.fields.slug,
          prev,
          next,
        },
      });
    });

    // Extract tag data from query
    const tags = result.data.tags.group
    // Make tag pages
    tags.forEach(tag => {
      createPage({
        path: `/tags/${_.kebabCase(tag.fieldValue)}/`,
        component: tagTemplate,
        context: {
          tag: tag.fieldValue,
        },
      })
    });

};

Creating an All Tags page

Now that we have created the template and the all of the tag pages using the createPages function in the Node API, we can create a page for displaying all of the tags. This works just like any other Gatsby page that uses a GraphQL query.

import React from "react"
import kebabCase from "lodash/kebabCase"
import Layout from "../components/layout"
import Navbar from "../components/navbar.js"
import Header from "../components/header.js"
import Footer from "../components/footer.js"
import Article from "../components/article.js"
import MainHelmet from "../components/mainhelmet.js"
import { Link, graphql } from "gatsby"

const TagsPage = ({
  data: {
    allMarkdownRemark: { group },
  },
}) => (
    <Layout>
        <MainHelmet title="Fek.io" />
        <Navbar />
        <Header headline="Tags" />
        <Article>
        <h1>Tags</h1>
      <ul>
        {group.map(tag => (
          <li key={tag.fieldValue}>
            <Link to={`/tags/${kebabCase(tag.fieldValue)}/`}>
              {tag.fieldValue} ({tag.totalCount})
            </Link>
          </li>
        ))}
      </ul>
      </Article>
      <Footer />
    </Layout>
);

export default TagsPage;

export const pageQuery = graphql`
  query {
    allMarkdownRemark(limit: 2000) {
      group(field: frontmatter___tags) {
        fieldValue
        totalCount
      }
    }
  }
`;

Making my Tags Linkable in my posts

Now that my Gatsby site is creating Tag pages for all of my different tags, I decided to add links to those pages in my posts. The first thing I did was add a new component called TagDecorator that I used to put a <Link> component around my Tag.

import React from "react"
import { Link } from "gatsby"
import kebabCase from "lodash/kebabCase"

const TagDecorator = props => {
    return (
        <span>
            <Link to={`/tags/${kebabCase(props.tag)}`}>{props.tag}</Link>
        </span> 
    );
}

export default TagDecorator;

I then modified my blog post template to use this new component around the tags in my post. I decided to leave them as comma separated list.

Since my tags are an array, I used the map function to populate the tags into my page. I also added some logic to add commas after each tag except for the last tag.

{tags.length &&
    <div style={{ fontWeight: 'bold' }}>
        <p>Tags: {tags.map((tag, i, arr) => (<>
            <TagDecorator tag={tag} />
            <span>
                {arr.length === i+1 ? `` : `, ` } 
            </span> 
        </>))} </p>
    </div>
}

Conclusion

Gatsby makes it very easy to query data from your site using GraphQL, and generate content and pages based on those query results. The more I use Gatsby, the more I am impressed with how you can make your content so dynamic using a static site generator.

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