Persist the Gatsby cache between Netlify builds for huge build speed improvements! ⚡️

Note: The functionality in this plugin is now available in the Essential Gatsby build plugin. Check out Essential Gatsby for additional framework-specific functionality on Netlify, including Gatsby Functions. If you choose to install it, you should remove this plugin first.

Currently, there are two ways to install this plugin on your application:

You can also install it manually using netlify.toml. If you want to know more about file-based configuration on Netlify, click here.

Add the following lines to your project's netlify.toml file:

[build]
  publish = "public"

[[plugins]]
  package = "netlify-plugin-gatsby-cache"

Note: The [[plugins]] line is required for each plugin, even if you have other plugins in your netlify.toml file already.

This plugin determines the location of your .cache folder by looking at the publish folder configured for Netlify deployment. This means that if your Gatsby site successfully deploys, it will be cached as well with no config required! 🎉

Each Gatsby site is different, so build times vary widely between them, but one common slowdown in Gatsby builds is processing and transforming images. Gatsby is smart enough to check if these transformations have already been done and skip them, but in order to get that benefit in a build pipeline (e.g. Netlify) the public and .cache directories need to be preserved between builds. That’s what this plugin does!

tl;dr: Repeat builds with lots of images will be much faster. With few or no images, the difference will be there, but it won’t be as pronounced.

Check out Sarah Drasner’s excellent tutorial!