I'm going through the Gatsby example starter blog and this is one of the markdown blog posts:

.md

I reckon the author doesn't hardtype to the frontmatter a string like date: "2015-05-01T22:12:03.284Z" every time he'd make a post.

Is this a vim feature? How do I automate adding time stamps to Gatsby's markdown files on save of the file?

Help appreciated :)

I'm going through the Gatsby example starter blog and this is one of the markdown blog posts:

https://raw.githubusercontent./gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog/master/src/pages/2015-05-01-hello-world/index.md

I reckon the author doesn't hardtype to the frontmatter a string like date: "2015-05-01T22:12:03.284Z" every time he'd make a post.

Is this a vim feature? How do I automate adding time stamps to Gatsby's markdown files on save of the file?

Help appreciated :)

• javascript
• markdown
• gatsby

2 Answers 2

Gatsby supports all official date & time formats!

So you can also just write "2015-05-1".

The filesystem source plugin does provide timestamp data as seen here: https://github./gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/master/packages/gatsby-source-filesystem/src/create-file-node.js#L52

It's undocumented so it may change in the future, but you can use fields modifiedTime, accessTime, birthTime and changeTime in any markdown GraphQL query.

Please note that these values are provided by the OS, so they may be higly unreliable. Usually OS timestamps on files are just indicative and shouldn't be trusted. Some OSes don't uses them at all depending on how the filesystem is mounted.

What you can do is to switch to another data source that will provide reliable create and updated timestamps. Wordpress provide that data. MongoDB can be used to provide that given you use the right admin interface. Others sources like Contentfull also may or may not provide that info.

By the way, if you absolutely want it, and are okay with the drawbacks, it's quite straight forward to add these fields in your GraphQL query.