APIs and Plugins in Gatsby

When you invoke an API or plugin within Gatsby itself or in a plugin you’ve provided to the implementation, what does Gatsby do on the inside? In this section, we’ll take a brief tour through the major phases of API and plugin execution in Gatsby from the standpoint of gatsby-node.js. An understanding of what portions of Gatsby are the most complex and computationally expensive will aid you in future debugging.

NOTE

This section focuses solely on the Gatsby Node APIs and associated plugins. It does not cover the functioning of the Gatsby Browser or SSR APIs, which allow developers to adjust how Gatsby behaves in the browser and during server-side rendering, respectively. For a summary of some of the most important terminology that you’ll encounter in a discussion of Gatsby’s internals, consult the documentation’s guide to terminology used in Gatsby’s source code.