Deploy a Gatsby Static Site

You can deploy your Gatsby static site on Render for free in minutes. Your site is served over a lightning-fast global CDN, comes with fully managed TLS certificates, and supports custom domains out of the box.

The sample app in this guide is based on Gatsby's official default starter.

Use your existing Gatsby repository, or fork our sample Gatsby repo on GitHub or GitLab.
Create a new Static Site on Render, and give Render permission to access your new repo.
Use the following values during creation:

Build Command gatsby build
Publish Directory public


Build Command	`gatsby build`
Publish Directory	`public`

That's it! Your app will be live on your Render URL as soon as the build finishes.

See Specifying a Node Version if you need to customize the version of Node.js used for your site.

Caching Gatsby builds (optional)

Gatsby requires the .cache and public directories to persist in order to take advantage of Incremental Builds. Render starts each build in a fresh environment, and only cache the .cache directory. There is no public directory present in the new build.

The reason we don’t persist the public directory is to ensure if you remove a file, it doesn’t get copied to the new build. Gatsby does not remove items from public during the build process. If you remove a file you'll need to do a manual deploy in the Render Dashboard with the Clear build cache & deploy option to remove the entire build cache.

Using the following build script will allow your public directory to be cached as well.

bash

#!/usr/bin/env bash

build_with_cache() {
  if [[ -d "$XDG_CACHE_HOME"/public ]]; then
    echo "Copying cached public dir"
    rsync -a "$XDG_CACHE_HOME"/public/ public
  else
    echo "No cached public dir found"
  fi

  echo "Building"

  gatsby build

  echo "Done, caching public dir"
  rsync -a public/ "$XDG_CACHE_HOME"/public
}

if [[ "$RENDER" ]]; then
  build_with_cache
else
  gatsby build
fi

Save this to file in your repository: build.sh

Then change the permissions to allow the file to be executable: chmod u+x ./build.sh

Replace the build command in your package.json with the following: ./build.sh