netlify

🔧netlify is quite cool. It’s a hosting for static websites with a lot of nice features, like custom domains, automatic integration with Github (provides CI and previews), automatically renewed let’s encrypt certificates, configuration-as-code. I use it for all my open-source websites (wps.orsinium.dev, orsinium.dev, svg.orsinium.dev, gweb.orsinium.dev, you got the idea), and I’m quite far from running out of quotas they provide for free accounts.

I avoided for quite a long time all static website hostings because I thought they only can serve whatever HTML you already have in the repo. No, netlify can also build the pages. For each build, it spawns an Ubuntu Docker image with a lot of stuff already installed (like Python and Go) and calls whatever custom command you’ve provided (which can be a shell script if you have a complex build logic). For example, in svg-playground, the netlify.toml tells to run netlify.sh which installs and runs task. And task executes Taskfile.yaml which does quite a few things, producing at the end all HTML pages and WASM binary. That could be fewer files if you want but I felt like being more verbose there.