Infrastructure as Code

IaC involves the notion of managing discrete environments (such as development, testing, and production) through configuration files and scripts that ensure consistency across your site builds. Differences between environments, such as differing Node.js versions, are a common but often subtle source of problems for developers. IaC is intended to minimize this sort of “drift.”

In Gatsby, configuration files describe the resources required by your project, including the dependencies and specific versions relied on by your Gatsby site. In addition, many Gatsby developers leverage plugins and themes that also need to be handled with cross-environment consistency. Because configuration files can be managed through source control, like other source files in Gatsby projects, we can use them to instantiate consistent environments every time we need to. This reduces the risk of errors caused as environments drift and provides a shared foundation for automated tasks.