Adding local filesystem data

In the previous section, you saw how to get a basic Gatsby website up and running. This website wasn't very interesting because there was no data to drive it. For example, the data that drives a blog is the blog entry content stored in a database—the blog framework that renders the post lists and posts themselves use this data to render markup.

You can do the same thing with Gatsby but in a more sophisticated way. First, the markup (or in this case, React components) is statically built and bundled once. These builds are then served to users without having to query a database or API. Second, the plugin architecture used by Gatsby means that you're not restricted to only one source of data and that different sources are often combined. Lastly, GraphQL is the querying abstraction that sits on top of all of these things and delivers data to your React components.

To get started, you need a data source to drive the content of your website. We'll keep things simple...