You can deploy your [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/) static site on Render for free in minutes. Your site is served over a **lightning-fast global CDN**, comes with **fully managed TLS** certificates, and supports **custom domains** out of the box.

The sample app in this guide is based on Gatsby's official [default starter](https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-default).

1. Use your existing Gatsby repository, or fork our sample Gatsby repo on [GitHub](https://github.com/render-examples/gatsby-starter-default) or [GitLab](https://gitlab.com/render-examples/gatsby).

2. Create a new **Static Site** on Render, and give Render permission to access your new repo.

3. Use the following values during creation:

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Build Command** | `gatsby build` |
| **Publish Directory** | `public` |

That's it! Your app will be live on your Render URL as soon as the build finishes.

See [Specifying a Node Version](/content/docs/node-version/index.html) if you need to customize the version of Node.js used for your site.

#### Caching Gatsby builds (optional)

Gatsby requires the `.cache` and `public` directories to persist in order to take advantage of [Incremental Builds](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/reference/release-notes/v3.0/#incremental-builds-in-oss). Render starts each build in a fresh environment, and only cache the `.cache` directory. There is no `public` directory present in the new build.

The reason we don’t persist the `public` directory is to ensure if you remove a file, it doesn’t get copied to the new build. Gatsby does not remove items from `public` during the build process. If you remove a file you'll need to do a manual deploy in the Render Dashboard with the `Clear build cache & deploy` option to remove the entire build cache.

Using the following build script will allow your `public` directory to be cached as well.

```bash
#!/usr/bin/env bash

build_with_cache() {
  if [[ -d "$XDG_CACHE_HOME"/public ]]; then
    echo "Copying cached public dir"
    rsync -a "$XDG_CACHE_HOME"/public/ public
  else
    echo "No cached public dir found"
  fi

echo "Building"

gatsby build

echo "Done, caching public dir"
  rsync -a public/ "$XDG_CACHE_HOME"/public
}

if [[ "$RENDER" ]]; then
  build_with_cache
else
  gatsby build
fi
```

Save this to file in your repository: `build.sh`

Then change the permissions to allow the file to be executable: `chmod u+x ./build.sh`

Replace the build command in your `package.json` with the following: `./build.sh`

###### [Deploy a Gatsby Static Site](/content/docs/deploy-gatsby/index.html)