"Everyone" in the circles I follow seems to love Netlify. I haven't used it but want to learn more about it. Here goes...
Netlify has been around since 2014 and was created because of the trend toward git-based deployment as well as static site generators[1]. It is essentially a serverless backend for websites.
According to their website, setting up a Netlify site and delpoying it is as easy as:
- Connecting to a git repsository.
- Creating build steps.
- Deploying.
I logged in with my GitHub account and was given an account with 100GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes for free to try things out.
Adding a site starts by giving permission to a Git provider (in my case GitHub) and granting access to the repository I want to use.
Note: For some reason, the Netlify page didn't update when I selected a specific repo in GitHub and required me to refresh the page.
The repo I initially chose was a static HTML site, so I did not set up any build settings, I simply clicked to deploy.
Netlify gave me a url and my site was live! It really was that easy!
I can see how this is a game-changer for building modern web applications. It's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for, especially for static sites.
With integrations to many different toolsets like React, Vue, Gatsby and more, there's a lot of potential here.
References:
[1] Wikipedia