Incremental building not working with simple Gatsby starter

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#1

[Edited as rejected by system for too many links and characters, after pasting the long deploy log]

I have followed the Netlify blog article “Enable Gatsby Incremental Builds on Netlify” of 23rd April to the letter. But the result has been an increase in build time, and all the files are still being built as before.

The Netlify site name: https://squawks3.netlify.app

The repo is based on Gatsby starter https://www.gatsbyjs.org/starters/hagnerd/gatsby-starter-blog-mdx/, modified to have 30+ demo blog articles and a list or index page with pagination. There are no other pages. When first deployed to Netlify 139 new files were uploaded.

All the steps in the Netlify blog article were applied after the 452pm build last night. So the next deploy after, at 503pm, created the Gatsby cache. Subsequent builds should have applied incremental building, but did not despite making only minor changes each time to one blog article.

Each time the deploy log said “Found a Gatsby cache. We’re about to go FAST.” but then builds the entire site (131 new files loaded, same as all but initial build). What is going wrong here?

The build settings (typical Gatsby) with public repo:-
build-settings

The deploy log is too long for a screenshot, how can I copy and paste or send?

#2

Our team will be able to find the build logs based on those details. I’ve moved this post to our “build plugins” topic area, where the team working on that beta feature will see this post and be able to advise you :slight_smile:

#3

Thanks! Update: since writing above:-

  1. I tried out Gatsby Cloud with exactly the same github repo (https://github.com/tristpc/squawks3). This creates a separate Netlify site squawks3gc. So now any change in the repo triggers a rebuild of both squawks3 & the new squawks3gc.

  2. package.json had an earlier version of Gatsby. I did not change as builds (in Gitpod) seemed to download a later version of 2.20.4. But Gatsby Cloud refused to work until I adjusted package.json to latest, here ^2.21.31. So this may have been why incremental building failed above.

  3. After running both Netlify sites to create the Gatsby Cache, I then made one small change again to blog 1 at 640-45pm 14th May. The deploys for this change, “blog 1”, now show both successfully created incremental builds (3-4 files new files vs previous full build). But the Gatsby Cloud build (squawks3gc.netlify.app) was 6s versus 4m 45s for the original site (squawks3.netlify.app). So the incremental build was here still much longer than the first full build of 3m 6s.

#4

Hey there! There are a couple things happening with the build beta that add time unrelated to Gatsby itself, but related to the Netlify build environment. I’ve added details in this post that should help cut that time down: