Building your first Gatsby site

The first step to using Gatsby is to install the command-line tool globally:

npm install gatsby-cli -g

Now you can run the command-line tool to generate your Gatsby project, not unlike how create-react-app works. The gatsby command takes two arguments:

• The name of the new project
• The URL of the Gatsby starter repository

The project name is basically the name of the folder that's created to hold all of your project files. A Gatsby starter is kind of like a template that makes it easier for you to get rolling, especially if you're learning. If you don't pass a starter, the default starter is used:

gatsby new your-first-gatsby-site

Running the above command would be the same as running:

gatsby new your-first-gatsby-site https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-default

In both cases, the starter repository is cloned into the your-first-gatsby-site directory and then dependencies are installed for you. If all goes well, you should see the console output that looks similar...