SvelteKit starter blog with GraphCMS

I made a starter blog with SvelteKit and GraphCMS, I’ve been doing a couple of small projects with it and I really like it!

This will focus mainly on the Svelte and SvelteKit side with not too much emphasis on the GraphCMS side. GraphCMS has a blog starter that you can spin up real quick to get started using the platform.

Create the backend with GraphCMS

First up I’ll create a GraphCMS project for this starter to pull the posts from, if you’re following along you can crate a GraphCMS account either with email or by logging in with your GitHub account.

Once you’re signed in you can either create a new project from scratch or pick one of the starters that are available.

I’m going to pick the “Blog Starter” project which will have GraphCMS schema already created with some content to use.

Next I’m prompted to give my project a name and a description then I’ll need to pick the (data center) region where I want the project to live, I’m picking Europe as that closest to me then clicking the “Create Project” button.

I’m then prompted to pick the pricing plan for the project, as this is only a demo I’ll pick the community pricing plan (free) and skip inviting team members.

Scaffold out the SvelteKit project

Now I’ll create a directory for the project change directory into it (cd) and use the SvelteKit npm init script:

mkdir sveltekit-starter-blog
cd sveltekit-starter-blog
# initialise SvelteKit
npm init svelte@next

I chose the skeleton project option with no TypeScript support and ESLint and Prettier config. Now I can install the dependencies with:

npm i

I can now start the dev server and take a look at the project, I’ll start the dev server with npm run and add some additional parameters to the script with -- then -o (or --open) to open in the browser and -p 3300 (or --port 3300) to specify the port to run on:

npm run dev -- -o -p 3300

That’s the project, pretty bare bones with nothing other than a landing page!

Add TailwindCSS

There’s a really useful GitHub project that adds additional functionality to your Svelte projects with Svelte Add in this case I’m going to add Tailwind with the Just In Time (JIT) compiler enabled:

npx svelte-add tailwindcss  --jit

Then I’ll need to create the base CSS file and add in the Tailwind directives for base, components, and utilities:

touch src/app.css

Add in the Tailwind directives to the src/app.css file:

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

I’ll come onto the styling later for now I’m going to focus on getting the posts into the project and using the SvelteKit layout to add some elements that are persisted through route changes.

Create a SvelteKit layout in the routes folder:

touch src/routes/__layout.svelte

The layout will be wrapping the project so the one requirement of a __layout.svelte in SvelteKit is a <slot/> see my notes on Svelte slots for more on that.

In the layout I’ll import the global CSS and add in a basic nav for now along with the required slot:

<script>
  import '../app.css'
</script>

<nav>
  <a href="/">Home</a>
  <a href="/about">About</a>
</nav>

<slot />

Get the posts from GraphCMS

First up I’ll list out the posts from the GraphCMS GraphQL endpoint into the index page (home page) of the project so that there’s a list of clickable links to take the user to the post.

I’ll be using graphql-request to query the posts so I’ll install that along with graphql:

npm i -D graphql-request graphql

Here’s what I want graphql-request to do for me, this example is taken from the prisma labs example documentation with the required query from my project:

import { gql, GraphQLClient } from 'graphql-request'

export async function load() {
  const graphcms = new GraphQLClient(
    import.meta.env.VITE_GRAPHCMS_URL,
    {
      headers: {},
    }
  )

  const query = gql`
    query Posts {
      posts {
        id
        title
        slug
        date
        excerpt
      }
    }
  `

  const { posts } = await graphcms.request(query)

  return {
    props: {
      posts,
    },
  }
}

Note line 5 where it’s requiring the endpoint, I’ll need to create an .env file for that and define the VITE_GRAPHCMS_URL note that the env variable is prefixed with VITE_ to expose it to the client, you can check out the SvelteKit faq for more info:

touch .env

I’ll need to get the GraphQL endpoint from GraphCMS for graphql-request. So from my GraphCMS dashboard for my project there’s a navigation bar on the left hand toward the bottom there’s a settings button. Clicking that for the settings panel then under “Access” there’s an “API Access” page that will show the URL endpoint.

One thing I’ll need to do before copying the URL endpoint is set the API access permissions, I’ll only want posts from the published stage so I’m going to check the “Content from stage Published” checkbox.

CLicking on the URL endpoint on the settings screen will copy it to my clipboard I can then add that to the .env file:

VITE_GRAPHCMS_URL=https://api-eu-central-1.graphcms.com/v2/projectid/master

I’m using Svelte script context="module" so that that I can get the posts from the GraphCMS endpoint ahead of time. That means it’s run when the page is loaded and the posts can be loaded ahead of the page (component) being rendered on the screen:

<script context="module">
  import { gql, GraphQLClient } from 'graphql-request'

  export async function load() {
    const graphcms = new GraphQLClient(
      import.meta.env.VITE_GRAPHCMS_URL,
      {
        headers: {},
      }
    )

    const query = gql`
      query Posts {
        posts {
          id
          title
          slug
          date
          excerpt
        }
      }
    `

    const { posts } = await graphcms.request(query)

    return {
      props: {
        posts,
      },
    }
  }
</script>

<script>
  export let posts
</script>

<svelte:head>
  <title>SvelteKit starter blog</title>
</svelte:head>

<h1 class="text-3xl">SvelteKit starter blog</h1>
<ul>
  {#each posts as post}
  <li>
    <a class="text-blue-600 underline" href="/post/{post.slug}">
      {post.title}
    </a>
  </li>
  {/each}
</ul>

Breaking this down a bit, the props: {posts} (or props.posts) that are being returned by the graphql-request in the Svelte module are then accepted as props to the page with:

<script>
  export let posts
</script>

I’m then using Svelte {#each} to loop through (over, round, whatever) the posts returned from the GraphQL query made in the graphql-request with some minimal Tailwind classes.

Now I have the projects listed I can click on the links but they don’t go anywhere and the error message isn’t great either, I’ll fix that by making an error page.

Adding an error page

I’ll create a basic error page to show some information to the user, first up create the page in the routes folder:

touch src/routes/__error.svelte

Then add in the error message and status:

<script context="module">
  export function load({ error, status }) {
    return {
      props: { error, status },
    }
  }
</script>

<script>
  export let error, status
</script>

<svelte:head>
  <title>{status}</title>
</svelte:head>

<h1>{status}: {error.message}</h1>

Now clicking one of the home page links will give a nicer looking error.

Routes for the blog posts

If you are familiar with NextJS dynamic routes then this next part will be familiar, if not then it’s a way to determine the routes (URL address) in the project programmatically.

mkdir src/routes/post/
# note the quotes around the path here 👇
touch 'src/routes/post/[slug].svelte'

Now in the [slug].svelte file I can do pretty much the same to query the GraphQL endpoint on GraphCMS for a single post, I’ll specify the post slug to bring display the post relating to it.

The query looks like this:

query PostPageQuery($slug: String!) {
  post(where: { slug: $slug }) {
    title
    date
    content {
      html
    }
    tags
    author {
      id
      name
    }
  }
}

This looks a little different to the query on the index page as I’m specifying a single post with the $slug variable.

To get the $slug variable I’ll pull that from the context parameter that is passed to the load function:

<script context="module">
  import { gql, GraphQLClient } from 'graphql-request'

  export async function load(context) {
    const graphcms = new GraphQLClient(

That can be used to get the .page.params.slug which is what I can add to the variables object for the graphql-request.

<script context="module">
  import { gql, GraphQLClient } from 'graphql-request'

  export async function load(context) {
    const graphcms = new GraphQLClient(
      import.meta.env.VITE_GRAPHCMS_URL,
      {
        headers: {},
      }
    )

    const query = gql`
      query PostPageQuery($slug: String!) {
        post(where: { slug: $slug }) {
          title
          date
          content {
            html
          }
          tags
          author {
            id
            name
          }
        }
      }
    `

    const variables = {
      slug: context.page.params.slug,
    }

    const { post } = await graphcms.request(query, variables)

    return {
      props: {
        post,
      },
    }
  }
</script>

<script>
  export let post
</script>

<svelte:head>
  <title>{post.title}</title>
</svelte:head>

<h1>{post.title}</h1>
<p>{post.author.name}</p>
<p>{post.date}</p>
<p>{post.tags}</p>
{@html post.content.html}

Take note of the last line here where I’m using the Svelte @html tag, this renders content with HTML in it.

It will take this:

<p>This is a blog post paragraph.</p>
<p></p>
<p>This is another a blog post paragraph.</p>

And render it to:

This is a blog post paragraph.

This is another a blog post paragraph.

Svelte doesn’t sanitise anything inside the {@html ...} so make sure that you trust the source of that data or you risk exposing the users to XSS attacks.

Style it

Now I’ve covered displaying a list of content and using dynamic routes with SvelteKit it’s time to make it not look like crap! 😂

I’ll be using Tailblocks for the styling elements, rather than dump out all the HTML here what I have done is made an example repo for reference or use as a starter.

Conclusion

I’m still early days with Svelte but so far I’m super impressed with it. This was an example with GraphCMS for the backend you can use Ghost, Sanity or whatever else fits your fancy.