14 comments

  • Kyle MacDonaldKyle MacDonald, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

    And I'm one of the testimonials! but let me reiterate that Netlify has been a really outstanding addition to our stack. We do a ton of static work (http://carrot.is/coding/static) and we switched from s3 (and some others) to use Netlify for all of it.

    If you have any questions for a client (rather than a founder), feel free to ask away.

    5 points
  • Mathias BiilmannMathias Biilmann, 8 years ago

    Oh nice, we're on Designer News :)

    I'm one of the founders. Happy to answer any questions!

    We're building the ideal publishing solution for static websites or apps, and believe that with the right infrastructure and tooling, the large majority of websites could be made as static sites. Making them faster, safer, simpler and cheaper than traditional dynamic sites.

    2 points
  • Ed AdamsEd Adams, 8 years ago

    Msut admit I'm very impressed at how easy it was for me to get started with this.

    I think the hard work has yet to come as I don't really have a clue how to actually push updates to the site I made, but what I've seen thus far does look quite cool.

    1 point
    • Mathias BiilmannMathias Biilmann, 8 years ago

      Looks like you started a new Jekyll blog, so you're pretty much all set now.

      If you make updates to your files through the Github web UI, netlify will fetch them and update the site.

      If you have ruby installed, just clone the github repository locally and run:

      bundle install

      From the command line in the new folder. Then:

      bundle jekyll watch

      Will start a local dev server and you can start editing.

      Once you push your edits to github, netlify builds and deploys the site again.

      0 points
      • Ed AdamsEd Adams, 8 years ago

        I think that updating from the GitHub web UI will work, I'll have a go at configuring the tools on my machine later, so I've saved this comment! Thanks very much for the help!

        0 points
  • Jamie WilsonJamie Wilson, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

    Hey Mathias and Kyle, thanks for responding. I'd love to get a short description of your workflows using Netlify.

    I guess the idea of not building locally is throwing me off a bit as far as local development. Do you compile and build locally for testing but only deploy source files to GitHub and Netlify rebuilds everything again?

    0 points
    • Mathias BiilmannMathias Biilmann, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

      Yeah, run local server for testing and push to github to deploy.

      netlify.com is a Jekyll based static site and the web UI for netlify itself is an angular app. Obviously both hosted on netlify.

      When working on the sites I run a local server with browser-sync.

      This is pretty much the ideal for front-end development since the site updates instantly without browser refresh when changing CSS, and the browser auto-refreshes when changing HTML or JS.

      It can be a bit of a pain to get a proper live-reload/browser-sync for a Jekyll site, but with Carrot's Roots livereload is built-in.

      Once I'm happy with the changes I've made locally, I commit and push to Github, and then netlify takes care of doing a production deploy.

      1 point
    • Jeff EscalanteJeff Escalante, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

      So you actually can build locally if you want and just push the files to netlify for hosting, and it works perfectly, and costs a little less. The benefit of building remotely in my experience has been when you need to trigger a build with a webhook, or when you'd like "continuous deployment", meaning your site will deploy any time you push to github. This is a really nice feature to have for some sites.

      I work with Kyle, and build roots (http://roots.cx), which is a static site build tool. A lot of the crazy static builds we have been able to pull off (like having a wordpress backend for a static site) have been because of netlify. You can see netlify show up in some of the tutorial videos on roots' homepage.

      If you'd like to try out netlify quickly and without the remote build, you can use ship (http://github.com/carrot/ship), a simple tool that pushes a batch of static files to a variety of hosts in one command. We have an adapter for netlify which is working well. Netlify also has its own command line tool that works much in the same way.

      1 point
      • Jamie WilsonJamie Wilson, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

        Hey Jeff, yup I actually found out about Netlify on a Roots video :) Haven't had a chance to play around with Roots yet, but it looks cool. Thanks for releasing it!

        0 points
    • Kyle MacDonaldKyle MacDonald, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

      @jamie - oh we are constantly building our site locally! we just keep our compiled code out of source control (by adding /public to our .gitignore) and then only push our source (non-compiled) up to github. locally, we use a "watch" command to compile the site and reload every time we make a change -- it just doesn't make it into our source control.

      we link our netlify "site" up to our github repo, and we have it watch origin/master for any pushes - once something has been pushed to origin/master, netlify just syncs our source, runs our build command (we use http://roots.cx) and deploys it to their CDN. the CDN feature is is really great, they do really helpful things like asset fingerprinting and compression - and it's a CDN, so it's fast.

      further, we use pull requests to review our code and once it gets the :thumbsup:, it gets merged to master and netlify triggers a new build automatically. think of it as a continuous integration server for static builds.

      another really awesome feature we use is netlify's webhook interface. we go into how we use it with our Static CMS workflow in detail over here: http://carrot.is/coding/static_cms

      1 point
      • Jamie WilsonJamie Wilson, 8 years ago

        Thanks for sharing. I'm currently using Webhook for a small site and really like it, but can totally see value of coupling version control with deployment with this setup. Contentful looks like a good solution, but the jump from Free to $100 a month isn't ideal. But maybe I'm just missing some of the added value there.

        0 points
        • Kyle MacDonaldKyle MacDonald, 8 years ago

          yeah their pricing definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but we've actually spoken to them about it -- and they've said a change in the pricing structure is imminent. also, we've used Wordpress as an API recently too, since there's a plugin that exposes a JSON API that roots consumes -- and if i'm not mistaken netlify is working on their own CMS solution with static compilers in mind :)

          1 point
    • Kyle MacDonaldKyle MacDonald, 8 years ago

      haha triple answer!

      0 points