Skip to main contentGatsby theme Carbon

Configuration

Gatsby themes allow you to override configuration from the theme by defining the same property in your 

gatsby-config.js
at the root of your project. You can see the default configuration provided by the theme’s 
gatsby-config.js
 file.

Site metadata

To add a title and description to each page, simply provide them to siteMetadata in your 

gatsby-config.js
file.

The language attribute applied to the 

<html>
tag on every page is English (
en
) by default, but you can choose to override this. For more information on declaring the language of a page in HTML, please review W3 Criterion 3.1.1 Language of a Page.

module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    title: 'Gatsby Theme Carbon',
    description: 'A Gatsby theme for the carbon design system',
    keywords: 'gatsby,theme,carbon',
    lang: 'en',
  },
  plugins: ['gatsby-theme-carbon'],
};

Manifest

One of the first configurations should be to override the default manifest options, you can do this in 

gatsby-config.js
. Any options you don’t set, will be provided by the theme. See the example project.

siteMetadata: {
    title: 'Gatsby Theme Carbon',
  },
  plugins: [
    'gatsby-theme-carbon',
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-plugin-manifest',
      options: {
        name: 'Carbon Design Gatsby Theme',

Theming

With theming, you can control the colors being used on the homepage as well as the interior pages. Your choices include 

white
, 
dark
, and 
g10
. The default for the homepage and the interior theme are dark and g10, respectively.

  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        theme: {
          homepage: 'dark',
          interior: 'g10',
        },
      },

Favicon

If you need to override the default favicon, you can do so by passing a relative path to the icon. It’s recommended to provide a 512 x 512 version.

IMPORTANT: For best results, if you’re providing an icon for generation it should be…

  • at least as big as the largest icon being generated (512x512 by default).
  • square (if it’s not, transparent bars will add to make it square).
  • of one of the follow formats: JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, GIF or SVG.
plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        iconPath: './src/images/custom-icon-512.jpg'
      },
    },
  ],

Image compression

You can enable WebP by passing 

withWebp: true
or providing your own optimization level. See the gatsby-remark-images plugin options. You can also tweak the image quality based on design tolerance and performance thresholds.

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        withWebp: true, // true, false (default false)
        imageQuality: 50, // 0-100 (default 75)
      },
    },

Global search

Site-wide search is provided by the theme. The only requirement for a page to show up in the results is for it to have 

title
set in the frontmatter. To render more helpful search results (and improve SEO), you’ll want to make sure your pages have 
description
set in the frontmatter as well.

Global search is enabled by default. To disable it, set the 

isSearchEnabled
option to false.

  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        isSearchEnabled: false
      },
    },
  ],

Under the hood, we use Lunr to create our search index. If necessary, you tweak the search scoring algorithm and source nodes. To do so, provide your own resolvers object to the 

lunrOptions
theme option.

Navigation style

By default, the navigation style used by the theme is a sidebar that sits on the left-hand side of the screen. You can see it right now as you read this documentation. This style works great for websites with a lot of content, like documentation sites.

However, if your site is more editorial in nature, and has less pages of content, you may want to use the 

header
navigation. This will remove the sidebar on the left-hand side of the page and replace it with a navigation menu that sits in the header. If in the future, the content on your site evolves and you feel the left nav is better suited, you can always change it back.

To enable the header nav, provide 

header
as a string to the 
navigationStyle
option. To switch back to the default left nav provide an empty string 
''
to the 
navigationStyle
option. Note: By using the 
header
navigation style, you will lose the ResourceLinks that sit directly below the left nav.

  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        navigationStyle: 'header',
      },
    },
  ],

When enabled, your header navigation will look like the image below:

Header navigation style

With the header navigation style enabled, the content on your page will be further left-aligned to allow for more content space.

Just a note: In mobile-view, when the header navigation is enabled, the sidebar will persist.

Edit on GitHub link

To add a link to the bottom of each page that points to the current page source in GitHub, provide a 

repository
object to 
siteMetadata
in your 
gatsby-config.js
file. You can provide a 
baseUrl
, and if needed, the 
subDirectory
and 
branch
where your site source lives.

To disable the 

Edit in Github
link, remove the 
repository
option. If the options object is now empty, delete it all together.

  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        repository: {
          baseUrl: 'https://github.com/carbon-design-system/gatsby-theme-carbon',
          subDirectory: '/packages/example',
          branch: 'main',
        },

Medium

In order to change the source account for the 

MediumPosts
component, provide an account with the 
mediumAccount
option.

plugins: [
  {
    resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
    options: {
      mediumAccount: 'carbondesign',
    },
  },
];

Other options

  • mdxExtensions
    – change the file extensions processed by 
    gatsby-mdx
    (default [‘.mdx’, ‘.md’]).

  • isSwitcherEnabled
    - pass 
    false
    to remove the Site switcher from the header navigation.

  • titleType
    – pick between four formats for the 
    <title>
    element for your site. Here are the four options using this page as an example:

    • page
      : “Configuration” (default)
    • site
      : “Gatsby Theme Carbon”
    • append
      : “Gatsby Theme Carbon – Configuration”
    • prepend
      : “Configuration - Gatsby Theme Carbon”
plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        mdxExtensions: ['.mdx'],
        titleType: 'append'
      },
    },
  ],

Additional remark plugins and override existing remark plugin configuration

  • gatsbyRemarkPlugins
    - An array containing gatsby remark plugin configurations to be added/overridden.
  • remarkPlugins
    - An array containing remark plugin configurations to be added.

The 

gatsbyRemarkPlugins
option is compatible with all gatsby-remark-* plugins, for example 
gatsby-remark-mermaid
. If a gatsby remark plugin does not work, you can try calling the (underlying) remark plugin directly using the 
remarkPlugins
option.

Example Gatsby Remark Mermaid plugin

For the below markdown snippet:

```mermaid
graph LR
install[Install Plugin]
install --> configure[Configure Plugin]
configure --> draw[Draw Fancy Diagrams]
```

to turn into an image one should add the following configuration to her/his own project:

 plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        repository: {
          baseUrl: 'https://github.com/carbon-design-system/gatsby-theme-carbon',
          subDirectory: '/packages/example',
          branch: 'main',
        },

Example Remark Grid Tables

For the below markdown snippet:

+-------+----------+------+
| Table Headings   | Here |
+-------+----------+------+
| Sub   | Headings | Too  |
+=======+==========+======+
| cell  | column spanning |
+ spans +----------+------+
| rows  | normal   | cell |
+-------+----------+------+

After installing the 

remark-grid-tables
plugin, add it to the 
remarkPlugins
array in the theme options.

 plugins: [
    {
      resolve: 'gatsby-theme-carbon',
      options: {
        remarkPlugins: [require("remark-grid-tables")],
      },
    },
  ],

Adding new MDX layouts

This would need to be added as custom components following this Layout component docs outlined by Gatsby.

Note that the layouts do not inherit from theme default. Custom layouts start from a clean slate. If you want to iterate on the Carbon template, copy 

/gatsby-theme-carbon/src/components/Layout.js
to your custom template as a starting point. When doing this, you may also need to change the import paths to the correct location.

Edit this page on GitHub
Page last updated: 27 January 2021
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