tl;dr Developing a gatsby-plugin-react-helmet-canonical-urls
because gatsby-plugin-canonical-urls
and gatsby-plugin-react-helmet
do not play well together when using the canonical link.
Recently Dan Abramov announced that he would stop writing in medium, so, trying to set up my own gatsby blog was a great week-end project. I really didn't want something fancy, just a blog site with a clean look that didn't take me so many time to set up.
My first step was opening gatsby tutorial. Although, I must admit that the people from gatsby did a great work writing the docs, it seems to be targeted to new comers, i just didn't want to read how to install node and all that stuff. I wanted to throw a one liner in the terminal and figure out thins on the way.
I finally found the generator cli and borrowing some ideas from Dan's Overreacted, I picked gatsby's starter blog which, to be fair, met all my needs.
> npx gatsby new nckweb.com.ar https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog
Mission accomplish π.
I need to fix two SEO related issues and I was going to be ready to go:
- I planned to import my medium stories, I've to figure out how to set the canonical tag in order not to be penalized by Google because of duplicate content.
- I publish my site with
www
and without it, so I've to automatically set the canonical tag for all the page (e.g:www.nckweb.com.ar/foo
page should have a canonical tag with the value:nckweb.com.ar/foo
).
Custom Canonical data
The boilerplate file structure seemed a bit straight forward:
.
βββ content
β βββ assets
β β βββ icon.png
β β βββ profile-pic.jpg
β βββ blog
β βββ first-post
β βββ index.md
βββ gatsby-browser.js
βββ gatsby-config.js
βββ gatsby-node.js
βββ package.json
βββ README.md
βββ src
β βββ components
β β βββ bio.js
β β βββ layout.js
β β βββ seo.js
β βββ pages
β β βββ 404.js
β β βββ index.js
β βββ templates
β β βββ blog-post.js
β βββ utils
β βββ global.css
β βββ typography.js
βββ static
β βββ favicon.ico
β βββ robots.txt
βββ yarn.lock
Checking the markdown of an example post, you figure out that properties are written with a front matter syntax (just like jekyll's). I just added a new one called canonical_url
which will have the canonical value. (As dev.to uses that name to set the canonical, I was in the hope π€ that it will automagically work, but i wasn't my lucky day).
I wanted to do some seo stuff, my first bet was checking the component with that name. Luckily, that component was using React Helmet. So, I just needed to figure out how to pass the front-matter canonical_url
value to this seo component.
The next lead was the blog-post
component:
class BlogPostTemplate extends React.Component {
render() {
const post = this.props.data.markdownRemark
const siteTitle = this.props.data.site.siteMetadata.title
const { previous, next } = this.props.pageContext
return (
<Layout location={this.props.location} title={siteTitle}>
<SEO title={post.frontmatter.title} description={post.excerpt} />
...
</Layout>
)
}
}
export const pageQuery = graphql`
query BlogPostBySlug($slug: String!) {
site {
siteMetadata {
title
author
}
}
markdownRemark(fields: { slug: { eq: $slug } }) {
id
excerpt(pruneLength: 160)
html
frontmatter {
title
date(formatString: "MMMM DD, YYYY")
}
}
}
`;
Yay! π. It was using the seo component and judging from the graphql query, getting the canonical_url
was just adding the property to the frontmatter
query.
So far, so good, I got the canonical for the imported posts.
Plugins, plugins, plugins
I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so my first attempt was looking for a plugin and I came across gatsby-plugin-canonical-urls
which did exactly what I needed.
Setting it up was as easy as reading its docs. But, things got a little bit ugly:
Two canonical links, why?
Getting hands dirty
I was decided to fix this issue, so I jumped directly into code.
As far as i understand (checking gatsby-plugin-canonical-urls
and gatsby-plugin-react-helmet
) a plugin consist of the following structure:
.
βββ index.js
βββ package.json
βββ .babelrc
βββ README.md
βββ src
β βββ gatsby-browser.js
β βββ gatsby-ssr.js
βββ yarn.lock
The relevant files are gatsby-browser.js
and gatsby-ssr.js
, index.js
is just a stub. Those two first files allows the use of the browser api and the ssr api respectively.
Reading the code:
// gatsby-plugin-canonical-urls/src/gatsby-ssr.js
import React from "react"
import url from "url"
exports.onRenderBody = (
{ setHeadComponents, pathname = `/` },
pluginOptions
) => {
if (pluginOptions && pluginOptions.siteUrl) {
const parsedUrl = url.parse(pluginOptions.siteUrl)
const myUrl = `${pluginOptions.siteUrl}${pathname}`
setHeadComponents([
<link
rel="canonical"
key={myUrl}
href={myUrl}
data-baseprotocol={parsedUrl.protocol}
data-basehost={parsedUrl.host}
/>,
])
}
}
// gatsby-plugin-react-helmet/src/gatsby-ssr.js
import { Helmet } from "react-helmet"
exports.onRenderBody = ({
setHeadComponents,
setHtmlAttributes,
setBodyAttributes,
}) => {
const helmet = Helmet.renderStatic()
// These action functions were added partway through the Gatsby 1.x cycle.
if (setHtmlAttributes) {
setHtmlAttributes(helmet.htmlAttributes.toComponent())
}
if (setBodyAttributes) {
setBodyAttributes(helmet.bodyAttributes.toComponent())
}
setHeadComponents([
helmet.title.toComponent(),
helmet.link.toComponent(),
helmet.meta.toComponent(),
helmet.noscript.toComponent(),
helmet.script.toComponent(),
helmet.style.toComponent(),
])
}
Both plugins implement the onRenderBodyapi
:
Called after every page Gatsby server renders while building HTML so you can set head and body components to be rendered in your
html.js
.Gatsby does a two-pass render for HTML. It loops through your pages first rendering only the body and then takes the result body HTML string and passes it as the
body
prop to yourhtml.js
to complete the render.It's often handy to be able to send custom components to your html.js. For example, it's a very common pattern for React.js libraries that support server rendering to pull out data generated during the render to add to your HTML.
At this point, I got a clear picture of what was happening:
- Both plugins added elements on the head calling
setHeadComponents
- Gatsby didn't prevent from
link rel="canonical"
repetition - Both plugins didn't take care if other plugin added the canonical tag.
Possible solutions
As I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, my first attempt was to "fix" any of the mentioned issues.
- Making Gatsby's
setHeadComponents
aware thatlink rel="canonical"
have not to be repeated.
Although this was one of my firsts thoughts, I wasn't really convinced by it. First of all depended on the plugins execution order (ie.: the first call setHeadComponents
will be the one which win). And in order to develop this, I needed a better understanding of how Gatsby worked.
- Implement the
onPreRenderHTML
api on any of the plugins (or create a new plugin that implement this api) in order to remove the duplicatedlink rel="canonical"
.
In order to avoid the repetition I needed to use getHeadComponent
to get all head components, check if there is a duplicated canonical and then use replaceHeadComponents
to set the head components deduplicated. Doing this will also depend on the plugin's execution order which was something I wanted to avoid. In addition, the documentation has a uppercased warning ("WARNING if multiple plugins implement this API itβs the last plugin that 'wins'") which discouraged me from this approach.
- React Helmet deals with this kind of duplication, if the canonical's plugin instead of using
setHeadComponents
set the link with react-helmet's api, the problem will be solved.
As I was using react-helmet in order to set meta tags, this solution actually made sense. I had just to figure out how to add the Helmet
component.
Canonicals with Helmet
With this approach I'll have to add the Helmet
element. As it has to be done before the onRenderBody
is called, i shouldn't use that api. In addition, in order to give the lower priority to the default canonical tag, this component has to be placed first (ie, on a higher level in the react's component tree) than the Helmet
component that the page uses.
A simple way to achieve those things is wrapping current page and inserting a Helmet component in that wrap:
const Wrapper = ({ children, ...props }) => (
<>
<Helmet>
link={[
rel: 'canonical'
...
]}
/>
{ children }
</>
);
Gatsby has the wrapPageElement
which allows to exactly do that:
const React = require('react');
const { Helmet } = require('react-helmet');
exports.wrapPageElement = ({ element, props }, pluginOptions) => {
if (pluginOptions && pluginOptions.siteUrl) {
const myUrl = `${pluginOptions.siteUrl}${props.location.pathname || '/'}${props.location.search}${props.location.hash}`;
return (
<>
<Helmet
link={[
{
rel: 'canonical',
key: myUrl,
href: myUrl,
}
]}
/>
{element}
</>
);
}
return element;
};
What about client side rendering?
In order to be consistent, the plugin should also add the Helmet
component on the client side. Although, if I don't add it, I won't trigger any React hydratation issue (the DOM tree that react hydratates is the same with or without this default canonical Helmet component), the canonical link is being removed when the client side react runs.
In addition, if you check gatsby-plugin-canonical-urls
, you'll notice that it also implement gatsby-browser
:
exports.onRouteUpdate = ({ location }) => {
const domElem = document.querySelector(`link[rel='canonical']`)
var existingValue = domElem.getAttribute(`href`)
var baseProtocol = domElem.getAttribute(`data-baseProtocol`)
var baseHost = domElem.getAttribute(`data-baseHost`)
if (existingValue && baseProtocol && baseHost) {
domElem.setAttribute(
`href`,
`${baseProtocol}//${baseHost}${location.pathname}${location.search}${
location.hash
}`
)
}
}
Luckily, gatsby's browser api implements the wrapPageElement
method. So fixing this client side issues is just exposing the same method under the browser's api.
So far the experience implementing a Gatbsy blog has been great!. The API is very simple, so if the long list of plugins doesn't suit you, you can easily implement yours.
Community around the project is very active, I even got a gift swag for fixing a little doc issue while doing this post!
Originally posted on nckweb.com.ar
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