Gatsby is a static website generation tool for React developers. In essence, this tool lets you build React components and captures their rendered output to use as the static site content. However, Gatsby takes static site generation to the next level. In particular, it provides mechanisms for sourcing your website data and transforming it into GraphQL that's more easily consumed by React components. Gatsby can handle anything from a single page brochure site to a site that spans hundreds of pages.

Here's what you'll learn in this chapter:

• Why you would want to build a static site using React components
• Building simple Gatsby sites using starters
• Using data from your local filesystem
• Using remote data from Hacker News