[gatsby-source-contentful] Error at fresh installment

[cpannwitz]

Hey. I'm currently trying to setup a basic gatsby site with the contentful-source-plugin.
Last week everything went pretty great, until that moment I had to show off my results and - bam - the whole thing went down in 5 minutes. I had no success in recreating and debugging.

Specifically gatsby-source-contentful errors out with the following:
entryItemFields[foreignReference.name].push is not a function

Preconditions:
node -v: 8.9.1
gatsby-cli -v: 1.1.24
gatsby-cource-contentful version: tried everyone from 1.3.20 to 1.3.28

Steps to reproduce:

1. npm i -g gatsby-cli
2. gatsby new testdir && cd testdir
3. yarn add gatsby-source-contentful -S
4. Editing gatsby-config.js

plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-contentful`,
      options: {
        spaceId: `MY_CORRECT_SPACEID`,
        accessToken: `MY_CORRECT_ACCESS_TOKEN`,
      },
    },
    `gatsby-plugin-react-helmet`
  ],

5. (optionally) Editing gatsby-node.js and inserting/editing code from example gatsby-contentful-site

Thanks for any help!

[cpannwitz]

Seems to be related with Contentful itself.
Creating a new workspace without any content doesn't throw.

My Contentful content type structure:

None of these fields are empty, no other Locale is enabled than the default (German).

EDIT:

Managed to get it to work, by deleting the field References (many) on my second content type.
It referenced entries from the first content type, wasn't empty or (I assume) otherwise corrupted.

Are there any known issues with this specific content field type?

[KyleAMathews]

This sounds like a genuine bug — would you like to put together a PR for this?

[cpannwitz]

I can try to find out, whats the problem, but I'm not sure if I know enough about this specific plugin or gatsby's way of handling data. So, can't promise anything 🤷‍♂️

[KyleAMathews]

Ok :-)

Start by adding console.logs around where the error is happening in the plugin — that's what I do to understand what type of data is triggering the error and how to handle it.

[e1moreno]

I am encountering this issue as well. It seems to be tied to references. As cpannwitz described, the issue resolves itself when removing the references from the content altogether. It does not need to be removed from the content model. Note, in my case the reference was a "One Reference," and like cpannwitz, the reference was populated.

Something curious, in my case, the reference did not give me issues at first. It wasn't until I attempted to implement onCreateNode. The issue then persists until I clear the reference in Contentful. Doesn't make much sense as to why this would occur, perhaps I'm just overthinking it 😄

EDIT: This may very well be an issue with Contentful or my frequency in changing my Content models. Noticing data being published under old structures. I will try again tomorrow and give an update.

Attaching my log.
gatsby-reference-failure.log

[cpannwitz]

I experienced the same, @Garbonauta .
At first, there was no error. Seems like contentful and/or the source-plugin needs some time to update the queried data.
Also I experienced - like you - that there was no way back, when the References field was introduced to the content model. It errors out afterwards, no matter what you change clientside or at contentful.

I tend to think, it has something to do with the "subscription" to data of the source-plugin to contentful. (as far as I know, you can simply query data from contentful, but also "subscribe" to it - api-wise)

[e1moreno]

@cpannwitz I fully agree. I was able to circumvent the issue for about a day. I had to redo the Content models and content to get it to work. Luckily, I am at testing so this is no big deal. However, once I had the need to edit the content. The issue appeared again.

Like you I noticed the following:

• References are dropped altogether. For my edited contents the references were null. Untouched elements remained pristine. Note, gatsby did launch and did not error out on compile time
• The issue with compile time occurred when I deleted those invalid elements. It is like they are negotiating on the deleted element. I would have to recreate the deleted element for gatsby to compile.

At this point, I would like to know what do we do from here? What is the next step and I'll take it.

[mrtannerjones]

Same issue - references were the cause of the problem for me as well.

[e1moreno]

I think I may be on the right track as to what is happening. It appears the plugin, gatsby-source-contentful, is, for the most part, pulling the right information from contentful. I still have some suspicions as to whether this statement is correct as I still had more issues described below.

I think what is happening, is that for example:
If you delete a piece of content in contentful. The data pulled from contentful does not match what is in Gatsby's redux store, cached in .cache/redux-state.json. Gatsby appears to use this cache file to compare expected information so it does not build the entire store every time you run gatsby develop. Thus, since the store data and pulled contentful data do not much, Gatsby crashes at compile time as it expects elements which are missing.
A quick fix for this is deleting the redux-state.json cache and rerunning gatsby. A new redux store is created and compilation appears to complete for the most part.

Now, I do not think this is the entire issue, I was still encountering problems where the recreated redux store did not include the missing reference types. Causing my code to crash at runtime. However, the issue appears to have fixed itself, not sure how, as I was doing some risky and ultimately useless manipulation of the redux-state.json file. I say useless, because it was in one instance where I deleted the store and it was correctly recreated.

For now, everything is working for me. I do expect the issue to reappear as I am still changing content models and the content itself in contentful. I will continue to take a look and see what I can find.

[tomjowitt]

I also have this issue but it occurs at build time. Like other issues in this thread, it occurs when using contentful references and createPages in gatsby-node.js.

Fetch Contentful data: 3785.866ms
error Plugin gatsby-source-contentful returned an error

  TypeError: entryItemFields[foreignReference.name].push is not a function
  
  - normalize.js:291 
    [site]/[gatsby-source-contentful]/normalize.js:291:52
  
  - Array.forEach
  
  - normalize.js:288 
    [site]/[gatsby-source-contentful]/normalize.js:288:27
  
  - Array.map
  
  - normalize.js:243 
    [site]/[gatsby-source-contentful]/normalize.js:243:30
  
  - Array.forEach
  
  - normalize.js:226 Object.exports.createContentTypeNodes
    [site]/[gatsby-source-contentful]/normalize.js:226:11
  
  - gatsby-node.js:179 
    [site]/[gatsby-source-contentful]/gatsby-node.js:179:25
  
  - Array.forEach
  
  - gatsby-node.js:178 _callee$
    [site]/[gatsby-source-contentful]/gatsby-node.js:178:30

[captainsask]

Just wondering if there had been any updates on this issue. I'm seeing the same thing as soon as I added references into my contentful data. It seems to be happening on build or develop. I tried using the previous method of deleting the redux-state.json in cache then rerunning but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

[zanedev]

I'm now seeing this also with Contentful on Gatsby V2 and gatsby-source-contentful v2.0.1. Would be nice if these errors from data modeling were more specific as to where exactly the problem is. I'm way too far in my data model and content to try and narrow this down so I'll have to dig into the code more and try to figure it out.