Gatsby: What Makes Gatsbya PWA (Progressive Web App)?

[melissamcewen]

I've been using Gatsby for a bit and loving it! I'm curious about what makes it a PWA vs. something like Jekyll?

[benjaminhoffman]

Out of the box, you get:

• super fast initial page load speed
• code splitting
• caching
• service workers
• much more but I'm too sleepy to dive deeper right now 😫

please read: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/prpl-pattern/
and https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2017-09-13-why-is-gatsby-so-fast/
and https://www.gatsbyjs.org/features/

If you are asking about a specific part of PWAs and Gatsby, please clarify and I'll be happy to dive into more details! 👍

[melissamcewen]

Thanks! I did the Lighthouse PWA audit for my out of the box sites and it said they had no service workers? Do I need some specific plugins for that like gatsby-plugin-offline?

I also assume gatsby-plugin-manifest takes care of the manifest thing.

I'm writing an article on easy PWAs and thought GatsbyJS would be a good example.

[jlengstorf]

Hey, @melissamcewen! You're correct: to turn on Service Workers, you'll need gatsby-plugin-offline, and for a manifest you need gatsby-plugin-manifest.

They're opt-in because the offline storage can be really confusing to debug if you're not familiar with how it works.

I'm going to close this, but let me know if you have any other questions, and please mention @gatsbyjs when the article goes live so we can share it!

[melissamcewen]

Hi all, just published it belatedly! https://rollout.io/blog/progressive-web-app-running-20-minutes/