Using Notion as a CMS for Gatsby.js

When I post on my blog, I write the content in markdown and Gatsby.js do some magic and converts everything to HTML. I had some cooking recipes on my Notion workspace and I recently wanted to publish them online.

Since I wanted to keep Notion as my source of truth, I had to find a way to publish them differently.

How my Notion Database look like

By the way, I titled this post mentioning Gatsby.js. But, if you use a different static site generator (like Astro or Next.js).

Big picture

From Notion to Markdown to Gatsby

I have one JS script that does different things in 2 steps:

Get all database pages (with the filter “ready”). And convert them to a markdown (or MDX) file.
Gatsby makes HTML content out of the markdown.

Step #1: From Notion to Markdown

I wrote a NodeJS script that uses 2 libraries:

@notionhq/client to query the pages of my database.
notion-to-md to convert the pages to markdown.

const fs = require('fs')
var http = require('https')
const { Client } = require('@notionhq/client')
const { NotionToMarkdown } = require('notion-to-md')

const notion = new Client({ auth: 'your-secret-id' })
const DB_ID = 'your-db-id'

const n2m = new NotionToMarkdown({ notionClient: notion })

// Get all pages in the database
async function getPages() {
  const pages = await notion.databases.query({
    database_id: DB_ID,
    filter: {
      property: 'Ready',
      checkbox: {
        equals: true,
      },
    },
  })
  return pages.results
}

const getBlocks = async blockId => {
  const response = await notion.blocks.children.list({
    block_id: blockId,
    page_size: 50,
  })
  return response.results
}

const download = (url, destination) => {
  const fileStream = fs.createWriteStream(destination)
  http.get(url, function (response) {
    response.pipe(fileStream)
    console.log('👨‍🍳 File downloaded', destination)
  })
}

;(async () => {
  fs.rmdirSync('./content/recipes', { recursive: true })
  fs.mkdirSync('./content/recipes')
  fs.mkdirSync('./content/recipes/assets')
  const pages = await getPages()

  for (const page of pages) {
    const fileName = page.url.replace('https://www.notion.so/', '')
    const title = page.properties.Name.title.map(t => t.plain_text).join()
    const blocks = await getBlocks(page.id)
    let olCounter = 1

    const cleanBlocks = blocks.map((block, i) => {
      if (block.type === 'image') {
        const imgFileName = `${fileName}-${i}.jpg`
        const destination = './content/recipes/assets/' + imgFileName
        download(block.image.file.url, destination)
        block.image.file.url = './assets/' + imgFileName
      } else if (block.type === 'numbered_list_item') {
        olCounter = blocks[i - 1]?.type === 'numbered_list_item' ? olCounter + 1 : 1
        block.numbered_list_item.number = olCounter
      }
      return block
    })

    const mdblocks = await n2m.blocksToMarkdown(cleanBlocks)
    const mdString = n2m.toMarkdownString(mdblocks).parent
    const coverFileName = `${fileName}-cover.jpg`
    page.cover && download(page.cover.file.url, './content/recipes/assets/' + coverFileName)

    const header = `---
title: ${title}
date: ${page.created_time}
slug: ${fileName}
${page.cover ? `cover: ./assets/${coverFileName}` : ''}
---
    `
    const fileContent = header + mdString

    fs.writeFile(`./content/recipes/${fileName}.mdx`, fileContent, () => {
      console.log(`👨‍🍳 File downloaded: ${fileName}`)
    })
  }
})()

Heads-up!

To run the script, run node scripts/notion-to-markdown.js on your terminal.
I had to handle the numbered_list_item manually (see the olCounter variable). The notion-to-md library currently has an issue with the ordered lists.

After running the script, my folder looks like the following:

content/
├── posts # all my blog posts
└── recipes
    ├── [recipe-1-slug].mdx
    ├── [recipe-2-slug].mdx
    ├── ...
    └── assets
        ├── [recipe-1-slug]-cover.jpg
        ├── [recipe-1-slug]-0.jpg
        ├── [recipe-2-slug]-cover.jpg
        ├── [recipe-2-slug]-0.jpg
        └── ...

Step #2 - Gatsby.js

Dealing with Markdown is a thing that Gatsby does well. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I recommend you look at their Getting Started guides.

After some CSS fine-tuning, I ended up with something like that 🥳

If you want to check it out, the project is available here. By the way, my website’s GitHub repository is public!

How it look like on my website

What could be improved?

Deployment

If I change a typo in Notion, to see the fix live on my website, I need to run the command and then git commit&push the change.

Limited block support

At the moment I only support basic notion items. Things such as linking pages together, videos or uploaded files are not supported.

Also, I didn’t find a way to write MDX (Markdown+JSX)

Import everything or nothing

My notion-to-markdown.js script gathers all the posts and all the images at once. It’s ok for now because I don’t have thousands of items in Notion. Otherwise, I’d probably have to add a new filter in the notion.databases.query() function!

About the author

Hey, I'm Maxence Poutord, a passionate software engineer. In my day-to-day job, I'm working as a senior front-end engineer at Orderfox. When I'm not working, you can find me travelling the world or cooking.

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