My Storyblok SvelteKit Example

This is a sample project for getting started with SvelteKit and Storyblok (headless CMS).

Highlights

I try to keep track of the notes I collected while I'm building this example project.

Enabling HTTPS

With Storyblok to allow the Visual Editor to embed the front-end you are building via iFrame, you have to enable HTTPS. Because SvelteKit uses by default Vite you can use the vitejs/plugin-basic-ssl plugin:

bun add -d @vitejs/plugin-basic-ssl

and in the vite.config.js you have to import the plugin:

import basicSsl from '@vitejs/plugin-basic-ssl'

and then, activate the plugin:

export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [sveltekit(), basicSsl()]
});

Installing components

If you are starting from scratch with a new space, you can import some already-created components via the Storyblok CLI. You can find the component definition in the components.json file in the root directory of this repository. To import the components, use the storyblok command with push-components option.

storyblok push-components --space YOUR_SPACE_ID components.json

Where YOUR_SPACE_ID is the identifier for your space target of the import process.

Svelte Preprocess

If you are using extra tools like PostCSS, or Typescript and you want to help Svelte to parse correctly the syntax of another language than HTML, CSS, and plain JS, you should use Svelte Preprocess. Because the Storyblok Svelte SDK uses Typescript you should configure the Svelte Preprocess. You can activate the Svelte Preprocess in the svelte.config.js.

Managing Access Token

In the Storyblok space, in Settings->AccessToken section, you can retrieve the Preview Access Token. My suggestion is to store the Access token in the .env file (you can see an example in the .env-sample file) in the PUBLIC_ACCESS_TOKEN parameter:

PUBLIC_ACCESS_TOKEN=youraccesstoken

In the storyblok.js file, where in this project example I initialize the Storyblok object, I can access the environment variables via:

import { PUBLIC_ACCESS_TOKEN } from '$env/static/public'

Managing region

In the same way (using the environment variables) you can set and control the region. When you create a space in Storyblok you can select a region (EU or US). For example in the .env you can set the parameter:

PUBLIC_REGION=eu

In the storyblok.js file you can use the parameter when you will create the instance of the Storyblok object:

import { PUBLIC_REGION } from '$env/static/public'
// ...
    apiOptions: {
        https: true,
        region: PUBLIC_REGION // "us" if your space is in US region
    },

Using Svelte component variables in CSS

You can use the var() function in CSS to use your Svelte variables in style section. For example in the style section you can have:

background-image: var(--background-image);

In the HTML template you can set the CSS variable (see the style attribute):

<section
    class={"hero is-link " + `${heroClasses}`}
    style="--background-image: url({backgroundImage});"
    use:storyblokEditable={blok}
>

And in the script section, you can set the backgroundImage variable:

let backgroundImage = blok.background_image.filename;

For a complete example take a look at the Hero.svelte component.

Preloading Page

If you are using a link via a href in your Svelte component you can control the behavior for preloading or avoiding preload of the linked page. The data-sveltekit-preload-data attribute in the parent tag of the a tag, you can activate the preloading (the linked page is preloaded when you go hover with your mouse, so when you will click the link the loading will be faster) or avoid preloading with data-sveltekit-preload-data="off". If you want to learn more you can jump on the official documentation of Svelte, Link options In the ArticleCard.svelte component, I used data-sveltekit-preload-data for preloading the article page.

<div
    class="card"
    use:storyblokEditable={article}
    data-sveltekit-preload-data >

Formatting js and svelte files

For consistency, I'm using prettier and prettier-plugin-svelte

For installing prettier and the svelte plugin:

bun add -d prettier-plugin-svelte prettier

Then I created a .prettierrc file with the directives for formatting js and svelte files. You can find the .prettierrc in the root of the current repository. For executing the prettier command you can launch:

bunx prettier --write './src/**/*.{svelte,js}'

Resolving relation

For resolving the relation (retrieving content from related stories) in the home page with the popular-articles component, for the articles field, you have to set the resolve relations parameter. You have to set up the resolve relations in two places: when you retrieve the content via API and when you set up the Storyblok bridge. If you are not resolving the relation, the articles field in the popular-articles component will be just an identifier (the story uuid), instead, if you resolve correctly the relation, the articles field will include the data from the related articles (the article JSON). In the +page.js file, you have to set up the resolve_relations option in get() method:

    let storyblokApi = await useStoryblokApi();
    const resolveRelations = ["popular-articles.articles"];
    const dataStory = await storyblokApi.get("cdn/stories/home", {
        version: "draft",
        resolve_relations: resolveRelations,
    });

In the +page.svelte file you have to set up the Storyblok bridge with the resolveRelations option:

onMount(() => {
    if (data.story) {
        useStoryblokBridge(
            data.story.id,
            (newStory) => (data.story = newStory),
            {
                resolveRelations: ["popular-articles.articles"],
            }
        );
    }
});

Rendering the RichText field

The RichText widget relies on the TipTap editor. The TipTap editor is based on a Schema that defines how your content is structured and is stored in Storyblok. The content is saved in JSON format, so if you want to render it into HTML you have to transform the JSON into HTML. The Javascript Stroyblok SDK, provides the renderRichText function for example:

test('code_block to generate a pre and code tag', () => {
  const doc = {
    type: 'doc',
      content: [ {
        type: 'code_block',
        content: [ {
          text: 'code',
          type: 'text',
        } ],
      }, ],
  }
  expect(resolver.render(doc)).toBe('<pre><code>code</code></pre>')
})

In this sample project, there is a content-type article with a field named richtext_field. The type of the richtext_field is Richtext. If you take a look at src/routes/articles/[slug]/+page.svelte file you see that rendderRichText is used.

$: articleHTML = renderRichText(data.story.content.richtext_field);

Typically in the Svelte component file, in the template part for using articleHTML variables you have to use the @html directive (to avoid the Svelte parse applying some escaping and sanitization to the HTML):

{@html articleHTML}

Rendering Components embedded into the RichText field

The RichText field is very flexible because you can apply inline style and paragraph style. You can also embed the Storyblok component into the RichText field. For example, if you have a Hero component in the Block Library, you can include the component in the RichText editor. If you need to render correctly the components included in a RichText field, you can loop across the sections of the RichText field, if the section is a standard one, you can render it in the usual way with the renderRichText function. If the section is a component (like Hero, Feature, Banner etc) you can render it as a StoryblokComponent using the Svelte component shipped by Storyblok SDK. Under the hood, StoryblokComponent uses the <svelte:component />.

For looping the sections in the RichText field:

{#each data.story.content.richtext_field.content as node, i}
    {#if node.type === "blok"}
        {#each node.attrs.body as bodyItem, idxBody}
            <StoryblokComponent
                blok="{bodyItem}"
            />
        {/each}
    {:else}
        {@html renderNode(node)}
    {/if}
{/each}

The render function is:

function renderNode(node) {
    return renderRichText({
        type: "doc",
        content: [node],
    });
}

If you are curious you can take a look at src/routes/articles/[slug]/+page.svelte file.

The solution above it works fine, but honestly I'm still testing it with some edge cases. So feel free to provide any feedback on the solution above. Once I will complete the tests I will open a PR to Storyblok Svelte SDK for automatically rendering the components in the RichText field.

Server Side

If you want to execute the logic on the server side, you can use +page.server.js way from SvelteKit: https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/routing#page-page-server-js In this examples we are going to create a route /serverside/ with a pure server-side implementation.

In this case, if you need to load the Storyblok configuration in 2 places: the layout and the page (in the layout you are loading the site-config story for retrieving the global header menu, in the page you are loading the story for rendering the page content) you can centralize the storyblokInit configuration in the stroyblok.js file in useStoryblok() function. and then call for example useStoryblok() in the SvelteKit load() function of +layout.server.js and +page.server.js. In this example, because we are loading the data from the server side we are going to disable the client-side rendering. In the +layout.server.js file you can set :

export const csr = false;

Tools/Services used

• Storyblok SvelteKit Tech Hub
• SvelteKit
• Bulma CSS