Netlify Dev

https://www.netlify.com/products/dev/

by cift • 7 years ago

873 229 7 years ago

netlify.com

gk14• 7 years ago

More context in this blog post: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/04/09/netlify-dev--our-ent...

colinsidoti• 7 years ago

This is exciting news.

How do you see `netlify dev` comparing to `firebase serve`? The `--live` feature sounds great and I can imagine the config variables are handled better, but otherwise I'm anticipating a similar experience. Is that correct or am I missing something core?

prolepunk2• 7 years ago

My friends have used netlify for dev deployments, and it worked out pretty well as a hosted solution.

For this product I'm wondering what does this give over, running setup and deployment scripts locally? Or running a VM connected to CI server that would run test and production deployment?

benmanns• 7 years ago

The dev command includes support for some of their edge logic (redirects, proxying) and functions with first class support.

gk14• 7 years ago

For one, there is nothing to configure with Netlify Dev.

prolepunk2• 7 years ago

But the configuration needs to come from somewhere, like existing netlify config?

I noticed that one of the features mentioned is this --

Netlify Dev automatically detects common tools like Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll, React Static, Eleventy, and more, providing a zero-config setup for your local dev server.

If your framework supported by netlify, just plop the projects with no configuration.

I found one or two Python projects supported by netlify -- https://www.netlify.com/tags/python/

It looks like Netlify caters to frontend development, as far as backend, mostly static site generators supported.

I would try this out for Vue.js

lucasverra• 7 years ago

Is this like working/collaborating on glitch.com/codesandbox (auto building, hot reloading) BUT being able to do it offline (train,plane dev) and then just push with one command ?

I guess i can see the value since i do realise im dependant to my internets connection to do some dev this last days (im a hacky ceo).

pcr910303• 7 years ago

I instantly thought of the incomplete/error prone Zeit Now dev that was introduced a few weeks ago. If this(Netlify Dev) can replicate the entire system stably I might move on to Netlify Edge. Replicating and testing is a pretty big deal :-)

Offtopic, but can anyone explain the differences between Zeit Now v2 and Netlify Edge?

k__4• 7 years ago

Yes, I have the feeling the whole "replicate locally" goes in the wrong direction.

You're just lying to yourself when saying local is the same as cloud...

icebraining6• 7 years ago

Why? They're just computers, what makes your local machine that different from a Netlify server?

sudhirj• 7 years ago

If your cloud edge functions only (completely stateless functions or containers run without any directly attached data stores) then you can pretty reliably simulate it locally - you can configure your own dev machine as an edge node.

Stuff like Lambda@Edge, Cloudflare Workers etc all have very strictly defined APIs that are executed on V8 (modified for security, but not enough to be incompatible). If you run a pure function on your local machine you can be pretty sure it’ll run on the edge.

We’ve already done this quite well with Docker - the image you run locally is cryptographically the same binary bytes you’ll run on production. It’s not that surprising to see it for edge functions.

rymate12343• 7 years ago

As far as I'm aware, zeit now can run server side code whereas netlify edge can only do at most some serverless functions, and is otherwise focused entirely on serving the front end

icebraining6• 7 years ago

Zeit Now also seems to target serverless functions, not stateful applications.

evanweaver• 7 years ago

Netlify Dev also includes support for accessing FaunaDB GraphQL Cloud, launched in beta today (https://fauna.com/blog/getting-started-with-graphql-part-1-i...).

We are working on adding support for a 100% local development workflow in Netlify Dev. It would be lovely to know what you think is missing from stateful local workflows in both Zeit and Netlify.

Eiriksmal• 7 years ago

Massive respect to the Netlify team. I played around with having my static site hosted by them (for free!) and got only a modicum of extra performance from a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet.

With this ngrok competitor making it easier to experiment with lambdas/serverless technologies, they're creating a compelling reason to use them for production builds.

SahAssar• 7 years ago

How is this a ngrok competitor?

gk14• 7 years ago

Netlify Dev has a live sharing feature to let others view the site on your local environment.

tln3• 7 years ago

Great move by Netlify.. they offer a lot of features such as asset optimization or authentication that can now be evaluated locally.

Currently I use netlify's redirects in production and maintain equivalent nginx configs for dev parity and a fallback just in case.

I'm super happy with the netlify build/edge products.

d--b• 7 years ago

I have no idea what this does. Site generator? functions? edge logic?

What?

tobr2• 7 years ago

Sounds like you should start by reading about what Netlify does.

icebraining6• 7 years ago

It runs their platform on your laptop. If you want to know what "their platform" is, you can just click on the Products link.

Essentially, it takes your code (from a repository), runs a build command (if configured), and serves the result over HTTP on some domain.

mattfrommars2• 7 years ago

Isn't this something which you can do with Jenkins? Pull code from Github and deploy it on S3 bucket?

I learned Jenkins creating the pipeline to AWS in less than a day.

joduplessis• 7 years ago

This is brilliant! I like Netlify a lot. A lot of my day to day infrastructure work doesn't rely on them, but I have used them for small sites here and there. Solid company!

kadendogthing2• 7 years ago

I use netlify for about 6 out of 7 sites I manage for myself and family. The last one I have on linode purely out of laziness.

Netlify absolutely kills it with their entire suite of offerings. I highly highly recommend people try it out if they haven't yet.

hombre_fatal3• 7 years ago

I was blown away by how polished it was once I finally tried it a few months ago. I set up auto-deploy on push to Github + build command in like two clicks for all of my projects and never looked back.

Their free tier is probably too generous though. I know someone running the biggest website in a massive niche and they are serving their SPA for free from Netlify.

frosted-flakes• 7 years ago

Well, without their free tier they probably wouldn't be as big as they are today. It's the same model as freemium apps: get big, then start charging.

zframroze• 7 years ago

Great stuff!

Slippery_John• 7 years ago

I part run a non-profit site on Netlify and the experience is pretty great. The real killer bit for me has been their GitHub integration where they will render a preview build of any PRs put up to the site.

syntaxing2• 7 years ago

Netlify service is ridiculously awesome. I host my site there for free and had some cert errors [1]. I messaged support and they had it fixed in less than 48 hrs. I seriously recommend others to use them rather than using Medium for their own content.

[1] www.powu3.com

amrrs• 7 years ago

Lately, I've been thinking to Port my Medium posts to Netlify. Could you please suggest any reason why you specifically mentioned this case ?

syntaxing2• 7 years ago

Better control and domain ownership. Especially since setting up a static site is super easy with Netlify. Set up a repo in either GitHub and Gitlab and Netlify will take care of the rest. The biggest downside is that it's hard to get exposure. However, it works for me since my site is just a portfolio site.

palidanx• 7 years ago

I use Netlify, but one of the issues I've had for CMS is easily uploading pictures like Medium. Are there any solutions to this?

I know in the github integration workflow, you have to manually upload the file and then link it which is kind of a pain if doing multiple images.

soneca• 7 years ago

I too had a problem while using the free plan and I too had an awesome and fast response from support that solved my problem!

Great company!

awb• 7 years ago

Looks super cool and super happy with Netlify hosting.

I just gave it a spin though and got this:

  Netlify Dev ◈ Starting Netlify Dev...
  Netlify Dev ◈ Overriding dist with setting derived from netlify.toml [dev] block:  null
  Netlify Dev ◈ No dev server detected, using simple static server
  Netlify Dev ◈ Unable to determine public folder for the dev server. 
  Setup a netlify.toml file with a [dev] section to specify your dev server settings.

But the blog post and the TOML reference (https://www.netlify.com/docs/netlify-toml-reference/) don't seem to include details on what to include in the [dev] section of the TOML file to get this to work.

Anyone have this tool working locally?

bobfunk3• 7 years ago

Docs are still a bit rough, but the README here should help:

https://github.com/netlify/netlify-dev-plugin#project-detect...

swyx2• 7 years ago

hello! thanks for the report! i just pushed a small patch that now has some more helpful messages.. havent ironed out all the states yet and probably need a state machine since i already cant keep everything in my head!

https://github.com/netlify/netlify-dev-plugin/commit/1c6df00...

larrywright2• 7 years ago

This looks interesting, but am I the only one turned off by having to ‘npm install’ to try it out?

sjbrown• 7 years ago

Yeah, I wish it were just a docker image up on the hub

hombre_fatal3• 7 years ago

That "just" is just your favorite alternative to "npm install". There's nothing "just" about it. Like preferring it was a pip or apt install.

sergiodxa• 7 years ago

You could create a Docker image that runs `npm install` and upload it to the hub.

otab111• 7 years ago

Possibly. The announcement is all about the local version, so there's no way to try that out without installing it locally. However, it's the local version of a product that already exists entirely online with no need to `npm install` anything.

Touche• 7 years ago

Can anyone explain the elevator pitch of Netlify to me? I know it's become quite popular in the last couple of years and I can't figure out why. I don't doubt that it's good at what it does, but it seems to do the same thing as any number of services.

For example, I see a lot of people talk about it for static sites. But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on Amazon S3. What does Netlify do special that these others don't? I'm not attempting to bash the service, I just want to understand what its killer features are.

Kye• 7 years ago

It's extremely easy if you're not a developer. You can drag a folder from your desktop and have it live with a CDN and SSL cert in seconds.

samhh• 7 years ago

I chose to rewrite my portfolio site in Gatsby and deploy it to Netlify with my custom domain pointed to it. It's a big improvement in ease of use versus how I used to do it with a Node server hosted on DigitalOcean, as good as I found their service to be. Do those other services allow you to hook up a custom domain?

smithmayowa2• 7 years ago

Netlify does the whole static thing better, by being extremely focused on all things static, which makes setting up a static site on netlify way less stressful than on github and amazon, there is also the market knowledge factor, I mean github is known for hosting code repos and S3 is known for hosting files(videos and pictures), netlify meanwhile is known for static pages.

xyzzyz• 7 years ago

Can you point anything specific in which it is better, instead of vague things like them being more “focused”?

miles_matthias• 7 years ago

Both of those services you listed are generic tools.

Netlify is for one use case - front end developers deploying websites.

That means things like automatic asset compression and minification, feature support for things you’d normally need to setup a backend server for (login, form capture, etc), automatic SSL certs, CMS, etc.

Yes, most of their features can be replicated with other tools, but the point of Netlify is that you don’t need to with them, because they understand your perspective (hosting a static website as a front end developer) and they handle things for you.

bovermyer• 7 years ago

I'm a devops engineer and I use Netlify for my personal site. I daresay there are more use cases than you think.

halleonard• 7 years ago

Not just front end developers!

imafish• 7 years ago

Netlify for me:

- I get free & automatic build, deploy and hosting of my JS app just by pushing to git.

ryanSrich2• 7 years ago

Plus an SSL cert from LE — all in the click of a few buttons or commands.

Xylakant• 7 years ago

I just want to understand what its killer features are.

It's convenient. It understands a lot of static website generators, runs the build, makes a preview, manages domains, DNS, https via let's encrypt. All in a single package. Nothing in that package is impossible doing by yourself, but it's just well executed.

indigodaddy2• 7 years ago

I wonder if using Netlify's DNS with a subdomain only would work properly if you delegated only the subdomain and not the top level name to Netlify's DNS servers...

jchrisa• 7 years ago

To me, it's that it packages up best-practices in a way that is useful for all developers from enterprise to hobbyist. By following Netlify's easy path you'll end up with a solution that would take much effort to duplicate. And Netlify's solution has enough of the same functionality with very little effort.

sreyaNotfilc• 7 years ago

I'm currently using it for my website https://vidcap.co (its on beta). There are three things that I'm using it for, but I'm sure other features goes pretty deeply.

1. Pairs the domain with the file server - I can buy a domain on Godaddy and then have it pair to my Netlify fileserver. Its pretty easy to get started. In the past I used Godaddy for everything, but now I do not have to.

2. Deployment mangement. If you have Github, you can setup automatic deployments to the production server. So, when you save some code and push it to Github, it will then push that code to your live server. In the past I would have to manually copy those files over. Now, I'm not sure exactly how to push manually through Netlify (I really need to brush up on it), so I turn it off if I'm working on some items that shouldn't get pushed quite yet.

3. It comes with security certificate (https) without any additional cost. In fact what I'm using is the free tier. I'm able to deploy an entire site for free (well my Azure server is costing me money, but still).

Hope that helps!

gouggoug2• 7 years ago

It seems you're now experiencing the HN hug of death.

Is it a quota issue or Netlify not able to handle the load?

michaelmior• 7 years ago

Mostly unrelated, but instead of turning off automatic deployment when you're working on something that isn't ready to deploy, why not just work on a branch other than master?

mbesto3• 7 years ago

Basically - once you have the toolchain for generating sites on your local environment, Netlify automates all of the toolchain in the cloud by just hitting 'git push'. It then has ancillary services for more "functional" components that often static sites lack (functions, forms, etc).

It's one of my favorite platforms because of its simplicity.

dmix• 7 years ago

It's basically Github.io but if you need a more serious operation on top of it. Such as a company marketing website, rather than a personal blog.

hbosch3• 7 years ago

I get this experience on my own VPS with Dokku, mostly. I thought Netlify’s big bonus is their CDN and pricing?

a-saleh3• 7 years ago

I jumped to Netlify after I had my static site on s3 and thought to myself "securing it through letsencrypt could be nice" and after 3 hours I couldn't get it working, so I ported the site over to Netlify in ~15 mins including the lets-encrypt integration and pointing the domain over.

rubbingalcohol• 7 years ago

Yeah it was super fast for me to set up a static site for my company on Netlify. 15 minutes and it was live with HTTPS.

newaccoutnas• 7 years ago

For reference you need to use Cloudfront to back S3 static sites (kinda sucky) to get SSL - We do that on prod but we also use netlify for dev (we could for both, but AWS existed before in out estate, accounting etc)

tommyderami• 7 years ago

Echoing what a few other people have said, but a few things I've noticed Netlify does really well: - Their builds on popular front end frameworks that use say webpack are really good out of the box, but can be tweaked and configured as well. I have run into odd bugs going from CRA to a production build on my VPS that for some reason just deploys seemlessly on Netlify. Not that I couldn't have fixed the VPS with a little effort, but it just works™ - The CDN also works on your static assets out of the box and serves so much faster than some of my VPS boxes that have a decent number of xeon cores running nginx. - While I haven't used it, apparently they put a veneer layer on Lambdas and MSFT Functions that make it less of a pain in the ass to deploy, ie abstracting away all the security groups, scaling etc details - It's free for everything I've thrown at it. It worries me slightly that if I ever outgrow their free tier the pricing will be really steep since you are enabling all the free tier infrastructure, but for now it's been amazing for JAMstack type apps.

xondono• 7 years ago

I’m a hardware engineer, I’ve done some web development in my free time but I’m not nearly up to date to set up something good looking without missing critical stuff.

I’ve tried looking around an AWS account, it wasn’t pretty. I got it to run in the end, but I’m almost certain that some configurations were either problematic (as in I’m probably missing test cases) or downright insecure.

I had a blog with all the features (write in markdown, latex rendering, code highlighting with themes) and the looks I wanted in very little time, at zero cost with Hugo & Netlify.

I do have a github account, but I don’t really use it that much, so it makes no sense to me to become a paying user just to be able to host a site.

The other option involves making the repository public, so I lose the ability to meaningfully have drafts.

rujuladanh• 7 years ago

I use Netlify, but GitHub does not require paying to host a public site.

ryanSrich2• 7 years ago

It's hard to explain. Unlike any other product I've ever used it just works. It's like hosting + CI/CD + CMS features all in one. Deploying just works, there's hardly any configuration you have to do. I used to put all of my static sites and simple applications on DO droplets, but Netlify just makes things much easier way easier (if you can believe it). It's like a PaaS for static sites on steroids.

IanCal• 7 years ago

I like to think of these things as "removing the sand".

It's coarse, rough, irritating and gets everywhere. It's the stuff that makes each tiny step that little bit more annoying. Checking how to set permissions on S3, looking up how to make sure things are redirecting to HTTPS properly, setting up a pre-live stage, etc. Each thing is pretty minor, each tiny interaction not a major deal, but together it's annoying. Netlify has not been annoying.

praveenweb• 7 years ago

Netlify’s offering seems to be a more polished experience for frontend devs. A dashboard to configure stuff like build commands etc is neat. The feature that i personally like is the ability to select any branch of the repo to be deployed by clicking a few buttons. Helps me immensely during dev/staging deployments. IMO, These tiny little features and UX differentiates Netlify from other static site hosting providers or DIY hosting

gcb0• 7 years ago

advanced CDNed wordpress from your github source.

kall5• 7 years ago

wait you can run wordpress on netlify? That would be so useful

eddietejeda2• 7 years ago

I don't like to use the term "static" site, even as a provider of a static site hosting service. I think when people say "static" they imagine a small site that does not change.

I prefer to see it as a build environment for your code, data, and assets. The data can change all the time, but it either changes as part of a build process or pulled from an external API.

Here's a good summary of a team choosing this approach for their data-heavy site: https://revenuedata.doi.gov/blog/homepage-revamp-part-two/

mr_toad• 7 years ago

I think most people understand ‘static’ as meaning it doesn’t use a CMS or database server. Content is managed in the same way as code.

It is confusing for non IT people who often think static means it can’t have any user interaction.

jczhang• 7 years ago

In Netlify's case, does that mean there is no backend? No DB or node server?

LeonM2• 7 years ago

One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had.

Second feature that is great is that you can use the cli to perform a draft deploy, which generates a unique public URL which you can share with your testers/marketeers/writers/translators etc. It's a great and easy way to quickly share test versions without having to set up auth (the draft URL's are a hash, so pretty long and unguessable).

Third useful feature is that Netlify can capture form submits. It's quite basic but works great if you have to whip up a quick page to gather email addresses, RSVP's etc.

It's also great that they have integrated Lets Encrypt, but Netlify did experience a bad outage a couple of weeks ago where wrong certs were served (for a different domain) causing a big scary warning for our visitors. Luckily this was resolved pretty quickly, but you do feel pretty powerless when something like that happens.

At Mailhardener we run most of our static content from Netlify and we are very pleased with the service that Netlify offers.

ricardobeat• 7 years ago

Welcome to 1997! This is how Geocities, Tripod etc worked back then (I think geocities.ws has FTP access too, for the complete experience). Amazing to see the web coming full circle even on this.

jniedrauer• 7 years ago

One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had.

How is this different than `aws s3 sync local/ s3://your-website.com`?

swiftcoder• 7 years ago

IPv6 support. For some reason Github pages is trailing badly on this aspect, and Netlify fills the gap (also for free).

symkat• 7 years ago

From one perspective it’s web hosting from the 00’s using git repos instead of FTP, and adding a couple of neat APIs as add-on products. Your build process can also be codified into Netlify instead of doing it all locally and pushing your final assets.

But that would be missing the point. It’s the promise that they’ll handle things for you. You don’t need to know how to configure a web server, ha proxy, systemd, firewalls, set up network topology or failover, nagios, collect logs, update servers, pay attention to security announcements. You just need to write your thing and commit it to git, and they got you from there.

You may want that for a bunch of different reasons. Maybe you legitimately have no idea how to do all of that yourself and don’t want to learn. Maybe you can do all of that yourself, but you don’t want to… there can be a bunch of reasons for that from cost/benefit to not wanting to bother maintaining a server for a one-off project.

This space isn’t really new, dotCloud in 2010-2011 I think I did the same thing — they supported a lot more backend languages, there had been some Ruby on Rails ones that were similar ‘git repo to production site’ hosting services, but I forget their names.

One feature they have that particularly made me go, “Oh… you guys are smart,” is https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling/ Any random small site usually wants some kind of contact form, and they’ll capture some POST endpoints for you and handle that. I imagine over time more and more things along that line will be added.

I don’t normally do JS stuff, but I’ve been learning recently. My friend, John, records videos for YouTube where in one recording session they make a half-dozen episodes. He’s been going on about wanting an app that has a global timer aligned with the video recording, and then a sub timer aligned with the episode with play/pause/flag/comment/delete functionality. I made it to learn VueJS and give him a good birthday present.

I got it set up and deployed in under 15 minutes with Netlify, it has SSL, is speedy, and with Netlify I don’t have to maintain anything or think about it any more: https://timer.onthebranch.com/ so it was a big win for me there.

infinite8s• 7 years ago

I got it set up and deployed in under 15 minutes with Netlify, it has SSL, is speedy, and with Netlify I don’t have to maintain anything or think about it any more: https://timer.onthebranch.com/ so it was a big win for me there.

The crazy thing is that app is basically all client side, and yet you need a whole managed server infrastructure just because there's no P2P way for you to share the code with your friend and for him to be able to run it.

s_kilk• 7 years ago

So it's shared hosting without the PHP?

I'm sold.

wrsh07• 7 years ago

I think it removes a lot of the friction of launching single page apps.

It does more than that, but that's an easy pitch from my perspective.

mooreds• 7 years ago

Hosting on GitHub personally worries me because it isn't their core business.

Hosting on S3 is cheap and I know there are tools to help me, but it's complicated to set up.

Netlify hits the sweet spot by being integrated with git, so you still have to be somewhat technical, but taking care of of a bunch of devopsy stuff. Things that their customers either don't know to do or don't want to. For example I thought about setting up let's encrypt for my personal site, but netlify has that figured out.

lgregg• 7 years ago

It's basically Heroku for the static generated site ecosystem.

I'm currently building a Gatsby/React site for a small grocery store chain, Netlify makes the process easy with hooks, cli, and many things I found on Heroku. Sure, I could host it elsewhere that has an S3 service but then I have to worry about configuration.

seanwilson• 7 years ago

But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on Amazon S3.

I've been really happy using Netlify (with Jekyll) for https://www.checkbot.io/ - I didn't have to think about server admin at all when I got traffic spikes from Hacker News and Product Hunt traffic, and development features make working on the website really straightforward.

Features I like:

- Git based deploys automatically when you make a commit

- Git based rollbacks if there's a problem with the latest commit

- non-master Git branches are automatically deployed for preview

- automatic CDN + HTTPS setup

- no servers to admin i.e. they deal with security, scaling and configuration for you

- they do instant cache invalidation of images/CSS/JS files for you so there's no stale files being served after deploys

- before deploying you can run complex build scripts on Netlify to generate files to be deployed e.g. any static site generator you want to use, run arbitrary NPM scripts, you can download data that to be rendered on to a page

- you can use Netlify CMS as a friendly web interface to edit blog posts, articles and FAQs. It's easy enough for non-technical people so it's possible to use for standard business websites that would normally require something more complex to admin like WordPress.

You can cobble together something like the above yourself but Netlify makes it simple and robust so you can get on with more important things.

People that say you can do something similar with e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet are missing the point and are for sure paying with their time. If you've worked in web dev for a while you've probably tried to automate many of the above features yourself but it's just never going to be as robust as a service that has a dedicated support team behind it.

brianpgordon2• 7 years ago

If you're not aware, you get most of that for free with GitHub pages:

https://pages.github.com/

It deploys when you push, is based on Jekyll, and GitHub handles all of the hosting/HTTPS/caching themselves.

ybahubali2018• 7 years ago

Just wondering does zeit also does the same ? http://zeit.co/

cbovis2• 7 years ago

Great summary!

Out of the box support for prerendering is also fantastic too – https://www.netlify.com/docs/prerendering/

SiVal2• 7 years ago

Obvious to everyone except me, it seems, so obvious that it's never mentioned by anybody, is: What about databases?

The answer could be, "Well, obviously, it's not for database-backed websites", or "Obviously it's perfect for database-backed websites, because now you can use their X feature for your database", or "Obviously, you use some other company to host your database but Netlify for everything else, which is a great improvement because...", or whatever.

What am I obviously missing?

corobo• 7 years ago

One of the things I'm using it for is their form processing

Form filled -> Pass submitted data to Zapier -> Chuck data into a Google Sheet

Basic usage for sure, but once it's in Zapier you can do with the data anything Zapier can do with data

jahewson• 7 years ago

It’s simple, fully-featured and insanely fast. Doing this with AWS requires gluing a bunch of stuff together, even with Amplify it’s still clunky and slow.

bytematic• 7 years ago

Gatsby website that gets built and deployed live when I push to a git repo. It does CDN too, which puts it above the competition. For free

madeofpalk3• 7 years ago

But you get free static sites through GitHub

GitHub doesn't support a build process, right? So you would have to do that yourself and commit that.

nearly free static sites on Amazon S3

You'll have to manage the build and deploy here yourself then.

Netlify is great because its easy, and free (if you're under their bandwidth cap). They have really cool features like automatically deploying a preview environment for pull requests, or a/b testing different branches.

I run an open source video game companion site DestinySets.com where I have a lot of data in JSON files in my repo. Github + Netlify means I can take PRs for changes to the data, sometimes from non-programmers (or beginners), preview, merge and deploy from my phone, all for free (both money and time) Its pretty easy.

brianpgordon2• 7 years ago

GitHub doesn't support a build process, right? So you would have to do that yourself and commit that.

GitHub builds your site with Jekyll.

tkjef• 7 years ago

for Amazon S3 i setup the s3, cloudfront & cert manually (should put it in terraform, but it takes just a second). here's a nice article to walk you through that (says it's for hugo, but you could use it for any ssg): https://agop.me/post/https-enabled-portfolio-hugo-s3-cloudfr...

then i build and deploy with a bash tool i made called NanoCD: https://github.com/tkjef/NanoCD

has lots of helpful options. easy to wrap your head around. easy to add whatever workflows,tests you'd like.

sytse• 7 years ago

GitLab does support free static websites and a build process, see https://about.gitlab.com/product/pages/

cbovis2• 7 years ago

I've been using Netlify for a while on https://0xtracker.com and absolutely love it.

A few things that I love:

- Extremely cheap (i.e. free for my needs)

- Deployment previews for every PR. Coupled with Renovate, this is a fantastic way to manage dependencies. Especially useful since it's a hobby project, making me time constrained.

- One click support for prerendering

- Managed SSL. One less thing I need to do.

- One click rollbacks for when I screw up.

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

I'm using it from https://superjavascript.com and the reason I picked them:

1. It's free.

2. Deployment steps are just push to git and you're done. Since I am using git anyway this is as easy as it gets.

3. Fast edge CDN (get's 100% on Google Speed Check).

4. https is taken care of.

5. DNS cname stuff is taken care of. and they didn't screw me over here, and let me use a different provide for email.

dasil003• 7 years ago

Github Pages or Amazon S3 are good tools, with a few features that may or may not suit your use-case, but in practice it's pretty easy to find one small detail that ends up being a dealbreaker (eg. you want to use Jekyll but you can't run custom plugins).

Netlify by contrast has the vibe of a swiss army knife or maybe a unix shell: a lot of very sharp tools that you can use to set up static sites in a lot of different ways and that compose nicely. I haven't done a ton with it, but you just get the feeling of a high power to weight ratio.

eruci• 7 years ago

It has a few bugs to iron out.

I did a test to https://trusting-heisenberg-a82012.netlify.com/ and I get "Page Not Found Looks like you've followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn't exist on this site.

Back to our site"

Other than that, it is a neat idea.

rvanmil• 7 years ago

Fantastic service. We've moved some of our SPA's out of our Heroku infrastructure and into Netlify. The integration with GitHub (and Slack), automated builds and deploys, together with the built-in support for rewrites and a reverse proxy works great and has made our workflow easier and faster.

forrestthewoods• 7 years ago

I moved my blog from Medium to a static site hosted on Netlify's free. I'm really, really impressed with Netlify.

A++++++ would recommend.

zwbetz• 7 years ago

Agreed with others, Netlify is awesome. I deploy my personal Hugo site https://zwbetz.com/ to it, as well as all my Hugo themes

Lightbody• 7 years ago

I’m curious if anyone has used both Netlify and AWS Amplify and if they can do a quick compare and contrast? In some ways they seem very similar, but their messaging seems fairly different.

Disclaimer: I’m a JAMstack n00b and the last real web app I built was “old school” where we did crazy things like keep a session token around and server the HTML, CSS, and JS from a web app. As such, I may be slow on the uptake.

kall5• 7 years ago

Netlify is focused on delivering your frontend and has some light backend features added on (form submission, lambda functions, auth). But you can't run a dynamic application on just netlify, because there is no database. But you might not need a database, which I think is netlify's proposition.

AWS Amplify is focused on providing you a backend (with GraphQL) powered by AWS services (dynamoDB, lambda). You can run an entire dynamic application with just AWS amplify. They also provide frontend hosting now, but that part I haven't used (oops that was your core question sorry). It seems that the CLI tool just configures S3 and CloudFront for you. This is probably much less polished then using netlify.

zenithm• 7 years ago

Netlify has integration with FaunaDB for the database tier.

swyx2• 7 years ago

i think AWS' GraphQL backend is a different service called AppSync? but they are often comarketed.

LeicaLatte• 7 years ago

Moved from Github Pages to Netlify this year and have never been happier. Will definitely give this a shot.

kyberias• 7 years ago

Quote from the page:

“Decoupled web projects involve so many components. The hard part is testing all the pieces locally, together. Netlify Dev delivers this beautifully with one command.”

What are these "decouples web projects" and "components" and "pieces" that are hard to test locally, together?

andrethegiant2• 7 years ago

For those interested in the GitHub integration / preview pull request features that Netlify offers, but don't want to migrate from your current host: I'm developing a product called FeaturePeek[1] that will spin up static builds into a feature environment you can share with your team / publicly. Unlike Netlify Dev / ngrok, you don't need to be online with your feature branch checked out for others to preview it. We can run dynamic builds too, and are agnostic of your host or cloud provider because we don't focus on production deployments. On top of that, we provide some collaboration tools so you can annotate / comment directly on the build.

[1] https://featurepeek.com

webo• 7 years ago

you don't need to be online with your feature branch checked out

Can you expand on what do you mean by this?

andrethegiant2• 7 years ago

The `netlify dev --live` command opens up a tunnel to your local dev server port. If you close your laptop, the connection closes. Similarly, if you switch branches, the content of your build will change, even though the URL you've shared remains the same.

mleonhard• 7 years ago

This appears to be the first "Cloud Functions" service to provide tools for testing functions locally.

siphor• 7 years ago

firebase and google cloud functions?

hestefisk• 7 years ago

Looks a bit like Squarespace, which also offers Git based deployment. I use it for a number of client sites and it just works.

ltrcola• 7 years ago

Netlify has been pretty great so far. My team was able to use the promise of a super quick CMS integration with Netlify CMS to justify getting out of building another nasty WordPress site (what our editors are familiar with). The actual Netlify setup caused no trouble at all and let us seamlessly move off of GitHub Pages, and now we can put in an integrated build process with NPM or whatever else we need.

Netlify CMS itself is a lot more raw but I see huge potential there, especially since it's open source. Our InfoSec folks loved the idea of content changes as commits. And the maintainers on Gitter are super open to help folks and work through changes. Already submitted a PR that was accepted and has made it into a release. And we haven't paid them anything yet, even with Google Single Sign-On integrated.

songzme2• 7 years ago

With our existing trend of moving everything to the cloud, I wonder why development environments aren't going in the same direction as well. It has so many benefits. I code on my digital ocean server (vim and tmux) and it gives allot of the benefits that netlify mentions like streaming live. If I don't have my computer I can just borrow anyone's computer (or use a public computer in the library) to make quick fixes or even implement features, all of which will be immediately live even if I log out of the system. If my laptop is lost or damaged, I just get a replacement and pick up exactly where I left off. With tools like react native, I can also dabble with mobile development in the cloud.

indigodaddy2• 7 years ago

I do similarly as you except s/DO/codenvy/

woutr_be2• 7 years ago

What's your setup like? I've been looking around to set something like this up, mainly for being able to do quick fixes on the go. (Or use my iPad when I'm on holiday)

songzme2• 7 years ago

Unfortunately I don't have much to share because my setup is so simple. Literally just vim (you can find really awesome vimrc on GitHub, mines pretty messy), and tmux (simple apt install).

When I visit my friends place I usually just use their computer, otherwise I'll use my MacBook pro or desktop. I don't think about setup much, I just use whatever devices around me to access and write code on my server instance.

pkalinowski• 7 years ago

Netlify is amazing:

1. Free 2. Good support 3. Custom domains with SSL 4. Takes care of most important backend stuff (forms and webhooks) 5. Functions (Lambda with zero config needed) 6. Abstracts server stuff like [redirects](https://www.netlify.com/docs/redirects/)

Lambda and redirects are the best. I can just put my scripts in a folder and they automagically work.

In my LinkedIn profile my website address is not clickable, so people are copying it to browser. This gives me bogus source data, but with Netlify I can do a one-liner:

`/li /?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=profile`

If you go to [patrykkalinowski.com/li](https://patrykkalinowski.com/li) from my LI profile, you'll end up on patrykkalinowski.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=profile

Zero javascript redirects, zero nginx config, zero S3 settings - one line in text file, git push and I'm done!

reificator2• 7 years ago

No markdown support for links. Typically you would handle them like you would a footnote[0].

[0] https://google.com

soonoutoftime• 7 years ago

1. Free ... 4. Takes care of most important backend stuff (forms and webhooks)

From my reading of https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#forms you will need to pay $19/month/site (!) just to collect the data from 1000 form submissions. By the time you have a couple of sites like this the price is already way too much for me and anyone else with basic backend knowledge. I hope I've misunderstood.

kaishiro• 7 years ago

To be fair, you get 100 submissions/month for free. And since you get drop in honeypots and reCAPTCHA those are typically valid submissions.

StavrosK• 7 years ago

I get far fewer than 100 submissions, and just the time it saves me getting the backend settings configured is already worth it, never mind setting up email, honeypots, etc.

godzillabrennus• 7 years ago

If you have a lot of form submissions on a static site you can elect to use Mailchimp for capturing responses.

They give you the ability to have 2,000 contacts in the system at one time for free.

V3loxy• 7 years ago

For a static site, I think 100 submissions/month for free is probably more than enough for the majority of people. Though going straight to $19/month is a pretty big step if you're just hosting your own personal website/blog.

It's $0,019 per submission, which I think is a fair price if you're actually sending that amount (and making money from it). It would costs you much more to build unless. That said, for personal (free) use there are a lot of alternative options.

ngrilly• 7 years ago

It makes the form features useless for hosting websites for non profits organizations and campaigns (which is a perfect use case for a static website).

zoeysaurusrex• 7 years ago

I decided I’m building and hosting my dev blog on Netlify now instead of anywhere else. This post honestly helped me get there.

Karupan• 7 years ago

Netlify is just fantastic! I reluctantly checked them out last year, and am now hosting 3 SPAs there. By the far the most painless platform I’ve used, with a generous free tier.

Thanks to the team and great work as always!

tomludus• 7 years ago

The comments here are so bizzarly positive for HN. Makes me feel that this might not be all genuine.

mbanerjeepalmer• 7 years ago

Check comment history for a sample of the positive commenters?

I mean, I could tell you that I too love Netlify with a passion but that would make it even more suspicious. But trust me, it's great. Try it for yourself.

knlam• 7 years ago

I mean, if you have tried Netlify before, you will know why they are loved so much

SonicSoul• 7 years ago

based on the comments sounds like a great framework, but wow what a bad name. sounds like some kind of mix between bug zapper and a light beer? maybe life insurance also..

thatssosid2• 7 years ago

I recently moved my site[0] from WordPress to Netlify Used HUGO and then one of my Post regarding MacBook Thermals was trending on HN, The site had more than 12K visitors. If I had been using WordPress I could only imagine how catastrophic that would be. Though I crossed their 100GB limit. But since this was a rare spike in traffic I feel their free plan is very generous. Netlify+ static site generators is good alternative for WordPress. [0] https://bsid.io

poxrud2• 7 years ago

With proper caching even a $5 DO droplet would be easily able to handle this load. With caching + cdn you should be able to handle virtually any load. I personally run cloudfront in front of all of my WP sites, even the low traffic ones because the costs are negligible.

thatssosid2• 7 years ago

I agree that DO would handle the load. The con is that it costs 5$+tax. Where as netlify is free and CDN and caching is taken care by netlify. Saves time

Lowkeyloki• 7 years ago

I love what Netlify is doing, but I've chosen to only watch it from afar for the past few years. I used to use a similar service that I loved very much called Divshot. But Google bought them, closed it down, and absorbed some of their tech for parts of the Firebase platform.

Now I use NearlyFreeSpeech.NET exactly because I do have to pay for it. I'm not sure how Netlify is able to offer their free tier. But I've learned the hard way that if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.

huxflux2• 7 years ago

Geocities 2.0

huxflux2• 7 years ago

Can we please stop the personal promote-jerking?

clrsky• 7 years ago

meanwhile the link is down..

jpincheira2• 7 years ago

We use Netlify for https://standups.io and we still are not paying a penny for their service. It works for our different environments, creates deploy previews out of every branch, supports split testing, and we even use it as a CI for our ReactJS app using Cypress! It's so painless and reliable, we just love it.

skrebbel• 7 years ago

Can you explain more? I mean, I see that you're essentially a video service. Don't you have a backend? Don't people login? How do you handle all that on a static site host?

jpincheira2• 7 years ago

Sure, happy to expand on it.

You're right, as a video service, we cannot do everything through them, we use our own encoder service with AWS Lambda, and manage users through a NodeJS app. And Netlify is a very important part of our stack, as it holds our main client app, which connects to these other parts of our stack.

Btw, congrats on TalkJS! Looks amazing.

elcomet2• 7 years ago

My issue with netlify is the lack of data or analytics about traffic. I cannot even see the number of visits ! That's why I use GitHub + cloudflare.

navs2• 7 years ago

Is that something that could be solved with Google Analytics, Mixpanel?

elcomet2• 7 years ago

Google analytics gives very bad results, given the number of people using content blockers. I just want the number of unique visitors, I don't care about tracking or anything.

pembrook• 7 years ago

Anybody found a good CMS solution for static sites?

I love everything about gatsby/Hugo/etc on Netlify but the lack of good CMS with out of the box SEO tools for writers to easily publish is a no go for my clients.

Tried Netlify CMS and it unfortunately required way too much work to compete with the full featured Wordpress setup my editorial clients are used to.

navs2• 7 years ago

https://forestry.io/ (hugo)

https://www.contentful.com/ (used this with jekyll)

codemati• 7 years ago

+1 for Contentful with Gatsby. Painless setup.

Netlify Dev

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