What is Gatsby Remark oEmbed, and how does it work?

As mentioned yesterday I plan to get a good chunk of work done on the next version of the gatsby-remark-oembed plugin this week.

But you might wonder what even is that and how does it work?

What is Gatsby Remark oEmbed?

The goal of Gatsby Remark oEmbed is to let you drop in a link to embeddable content:

Embed anything that supports the oEmbed protocol!

https://youtu.be/VhrOe0X_oA8

By adding a link on its own line!

And have it show up like so on your Gatsby site:

YouTube embedded in the html

How does it work?

The plugin is a gatsby-transformer-remark sub-plugin. Meaning it will only do work on MarkdownRemark-nodes.

For each MarkdownRemark-node Gatsby Remark oEmbed finds the standalone links, checks the oEmbed provider list for a match, and swaps the link out for the result coming back from the matching provider's oEmbed endpoint.

In the example above, that means swapping:

https://youtu.be/VhrOe0X_oA8

with the html-value of the oEmbed response from YouTube:

{
  "title": "\ud83d\udd34 \ud83c\udff4\u200d\u2620\ufe0f Source YouTube information using oEmbed, no YouTube API Key needed \u00b7 #GatsbyJS Deep Dive",
  "author_name": "Queen Raae",
  "author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/c/QueenRaae",
  "type": "video",
  "height": 113,
  "width": 200,
  "version": "1.0",
  "provider_name": "YouTube",
  "provider_url": "https://www.youtube.com/",
  "thumbnail_height": 360,
  "thumbnail_width": 480,
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VhrOe0X_oA8/hqdefault.jpg",
  "html": "\u003ciframe width=\u0022200\u0022 height=\u0022113\u0022 src=\u0022https://www.youtube.com/embed/VhrOe0X_oA8?feature=oembed\u0022 frameborder=\u00220\u0022 allow=\u0022accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\u0022 allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e"
}

that we got by calling YouTube's oEmbed endpoint with the original standalone link: https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://youtu.be/VhrOe0X_oA8.

 

  • If this sounds interesting to you and you would like to contribute, shoot me a reply, and I'll loop you in!

 
All the best,
Queen Raae

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