Gatsby: HTML5 Download Link

[beardedfinch]

I'm trying to do something fairly simple - offer a file for download, but am finding much difficulty in the process. I'm specifically wanting to offer a yaml and a pdf for download. Should this be done using the static folder? Thank you for the assistance!

Specifically looking to do something like:
<a href="/src/pages/category/_fields.yaml" download="fields.yaml">Download</a>

[benforshey]

Your /src/pages/category folder won't exist in your production site (after you run gatsby build), so you can use the static folder like you suggested. If you placed the file in /static/documents/, your href would be /documents/_fields.yaml.

Let me know how it works out for you! :-)

[beardedfinch]

Thanks, @benforshey, that makes a lot of sense. I had tried using the static folder, but I'm discovering the problem is deeper - the contents of my static and img folders aren't actually getting copied into /public when running dev or building. I'm assuming something is wonky in my gatsby configuration causing this issue.

[benforshey]

Sure thing, @beardedfinch. If you feel like opening up a public repo, I'd be happy to take a look at your code.

You probably already know this, but Gatsby generally recommends keeping things within the module system—importing your images if at all possible instead of dropping them into a static image folder. You can read more about why in Adding Images, Fonts, and Files.

[beardedfinch]

Thanks again, @benforshey. This is likely the result of growing pains from updating gatsby from 0.10 to 1.9.

The site is open source, so feel free to take a look and let me know if you see where something went wrong: repo.

[beardedfinch]

@benforshey importing seems to be working well, so I'll move forward with that and convert the other site resources to do the same. Thank you again for the assistance.

[benforshey]

Neat project! Glad that importing is working well for you. You might have some trouble turning an imported *.yaml file into an downloadable asset (just a guess, not proven).

From the repo, I noticed that your static folder is not at the project root. It has to live at root level for Gatsby: /static/* will end up at /public/*. For instance, if you were to drop your favicon.ico in /static/, and then run gatsby build, it would end up in /public/favicon.ico.

I hope that helps! I'm definitely going to star that repo.

[beardedfinch]

Thanks for the tip on the static folder, @benforshey, that's a big help. You're right about the yaml file - it just gets read in as an object - I'll find a workaround for that or just download a different file type.