GatsbyJS - How to include date in blog post url

When I was developing my new website using Gatsby JS I wanted to customize the blog post URL based on folder structure and folder names. And of course based on other fields in my markdown files. In my case I wanted all blog posts URLs in the following format /blog/yyyy-mm-dd/blog-post-title. There are few ways to do this:

1. using for example slug field in the markdown file and enter the full slug
2. Use the onCreateNode() function which is used in the gatsby-node.js file to dynamically generate the slug/url.

I tried both ways and finally I ended with the second option which gave me more flexibility to modify the final blog structure in one place. Because you do not want to update all slug fields in all markdown files in the future if there will be some reason to do so. It should be so much time-consuming depending on how many markdown files/blog posts you have.

Using onCreateNode() function

This function is called whenever a node is created or updated which makes it the most ideal place to add the functionality we want to perform. It is in the gatsby-node.js file.

What we want to do here is to retrieve title and date fields from frontmatter nodes. title is then slugified. After that we want to check if the node is really the blog post (because I use blog template also for a few pages) and the path should begin with /blog. Finally by using the condition we concatenate our path and create node fields using createNodeField().

exports.onCreateNode = ({ node, actions }) => {
  const { createNodeField } = actions;

  if (node.internal.type === `MarkdownRemark`) {
    // create post path
    const { title, date } = node.frontmatter;
    const slug = slugify(title, { lower: true });
    const dateRegex = /\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}/;
    let postPath = `/${slug}`;
    // If post directory includes date => blog post
    // If not => page
    if (node.parent.absolutePath.match(dateRegex)) {
      postPath = `/blog/${date}/${slug}`;
    }

    // create slug
    createNodeField({
      name: 'slug',
      node,
      value: slug,
    });

    // create path
    createNodeField({
      name: 'path',
      node,
      value: postPath,
    });
  }
};

After all these changes you will need to re-run the gatsby develop command.

Resources

• GatsbyJs: Official tutorial - part 7
• Surinder Bhomra: Include date in blog post slug