terriblecode

So this is kind of a follow up to my blog post that I wrote about hosting your own static site, which is basically to say that I’ve stopped hosting/deploying my own site and I’ve started to use Netlify!

Basic Netlify Setup

Netlify was very easy to setup, it followed this basic workflow:

1. Login with Github OAuth
2. Add the site as a site to build
3. Add a netlify.toml for deploy previews
4. Add my custom domain (and setup DNS)

Features of note

Deploy previews for pull requests / drafts

One of my biggest gripes from deploying my own site was that when I was collecting feedback from a post that the only real thing I could point to for my editors was a PR that didn’t really signify what the final product was going to look like. With Netlify however I have the option to push drafts without worry and have them build only on pull request builds!

The setup for this is fairly simple in the netlify.toml:

[build]
publish = "public"
command = "hugo"

[context.deploy-preview]
command = "hugo --buildFuture --buildDrafts -b $DEPLOY_URL"

Automatic HTTPS with LetsEncrypt

Once you setup your custom domain and your DNS is verified Netlify will automatically supply your site with a HTTPS certificate, which is super easy!

Autopublishing on push

Before I started using Netlify as my deployment service I was using git push live as my standard to deploy this site. This method was manual and I honestly sometimes forgot to do it at all when pushing up a new post.

Now with Netlify I can push to the main repository and be assured that it’ll redeploy my site even if it’s a merge on Github!

Final thoughts

If you’re hosting a static site you probably should just use Netlify, not only is it easy to setup but it provides a lot of great features that will make your life easier.

Have any questions? ping me over at @_seemethere