Move to Netlify

[stefanjudis]

Hey folks,

I played around with netlify the last week and it's pretty sweet. and also way cheaper.
What do you think of going static sites?! :D

We'd also get H2, HTTPS and a CDN then. ;)

Only thing to figure out would be the search (an algolia combination probably) and generating the stats (any kind of cronjob probably)

Any objections?

@radibit @marcobiedermann @ben-eb

[marcobiedermann]

To be honest, I have no experience with netlify but I am always open to new stuff.
I've already thought about using a static site generator because we do not have that much on the server side.

At our current state, I do not think we need some third party service to search / index out content.
We could use the existing search on the client side and get and set the hast from and to URL.

The main server side part should be fetching all data from social network which could be done via cron job, as you mentioned.

So I am all open to it :D

[ben-eb]

+1 to static site generators, I'm using https://phenomic.io/ for cssnano's docs and it's great! 😄

[marcobiedermann]

For my personal site, I use EJS templates and JSON data to generate static sites, deploy them on my GitHub Pages branch, use a custom domain and enable CloudFlare for CDN and free SSL.

I've taken a look at the netlify homepage and watched some of their tutorials.
@stefanjudis What would be some pros / features of choosing netlify?

[stefanjudis]

To be honest, I have no experience with netlify but I am always open to new stuff.

Define a build process netlify deploy and that's it. ;)

and set the hash from and to URL

I'm not a big fan of hashes tbh... but yeah. I'd like to find a cleaner solution.

The main server side part should be fetching all data from social network which could be done via cron job, as you mentioned.

That would just be a rebuild every 3h or something

I'm using https://phenomic.io/ for cssnano's docs and it's great!

I'd probably go custom solution, as all logic is already there. Just to save time. :)

What would be some pros / features of choosing netlify?

Pros:

• first of all Cost -> Heroku costs me ~50€ a month
• free SSL, H2 and CDN
• faster response times because no server processing + we could cache on the CDN level too
• auto deploys after merges, currently some one has to do git push heroku master

Cons:

• we'd have to rebuild the site
• no server side logic anymore as for e.g. search

[ben-eb]

@stefanjudis Are you sure about a custom solution? There's like a billion pre-made solutions out there. 😄 https://www.staticgen.com/

[radibit]

Netlify is sweet! Really good, easy to configure platform. I'm using it for couple of months now (my personal website on Jekyll), and it's just a perfect match for static sites. Another example is a side project I'm working on, where I choose Hugo. Also ❤️ their free plan for open source projects!

I'm using https://phenomic.io/ for cssnano's docs and it's great!

I can say the same for Hugo! So fast, simple to use, yet powerful with strong community.

In terms of compromises, I believe having CDN, H2, TLS, and cheeper price is already a win win situation. For the search functionality, there are some interesting options e.g. DuckDuckGo site search, Algolia(free till 100k operations per month) etc.

[stefanjudis]

Well... we have all logic sitting in app.js to render HTML. Shuffling a bit of code and exchange res.send with fs.writeFileSync should do the job (I guess)? :D
I'd just try to avoid restructurering everything in first iteration...

I also still like the JSON approach for adding resources.

Algolia(free till 100k operations per month) etc.

Also free for open source. ;) It's powering a ton of library docs already.

[marcobiedermann]

I would like to go with GatsbyJS because it uses React & GraphQL (to make requests to the APIs and store the data locally) under the hook and also brings some huge client site performance benefits out of the box.
I would prefer GatsbyJS over Hugo because it is written in JavaScript instead of Go and makes it super easy to split the UI into components which could be easier tested and maintained.

[radibit]

Though, I have more experience with the Vue.js ecosystem (including Nuxt.js), I agree that GatsbyJS will be a solid choice for perf-tooling with all the performance benefits and sweet deployment process with Netlify.

I believe it will be also possible to keep the current data structure which might save some dev effort (still learning GraphQL 😊 so not 100% sure about that).

Unfortunately, I don't have any time at the moment to actively participate to the site refactoring, but will be happy to join at the some point!