I run destinysets.com, a companion site for the video game Destiny 2, and I cannot say how much of a life saver it has been for me. Not only are deploys as simple as a git push, but I also get next-level things like "preview environments" for pull requests _for free_.

The PR preview environments are super important to me because there's a lot of curated data that powers the site, as JSON files in the repo, and I accept user contributions. The Preview environments means I can check what it looks like without having to pull down and run it locally - I even preview, merge and deploy from my phone sometimes. It's amazing.

Hey, I'm a user at destinysets! I really love what you've done with the platform. The experience is a lot faster than some of the other tools out there.

I'm also a very happy Netlify user. Their product seems years ahead of other tools. My favorite thing is that you can now manage DNS and generate SSL for all domains with a single click. Perfect for static sites, SPAs, etc.

I love how Netlify allows you to use the benefits of static site technology (like distributed version control) while allowing for dynamic site functionality like forms. I looked at the documentation for forms https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling/#receiving-submis... and it looks very easy.

I can see how people would use Netlify over GitLab. By the way, in GitLab we allow you to test a branch with a review app. In fact for 11.5 we're planning to show you a direct link to the page that changes https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33418 and someone contributed the option to make the static site that is generate with pages private https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33422

Lots of people use Netlify with GitLab as well. Some using our connection to GitLab and some pushing from GitLab's CI to Netlify via CLI.

Any way we could make the connection with Netlify better? Netlify already added support for GitLab https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/13/gitlab-integration-f...

Maybe a JAMS template?

Yeah, we integrate pretty deeply already. We do have some new flows that could potentially make the story around publishing to Netlify from GitLab cloud seamless from an authentication standpoint, would be happy to brainstorm!

Great, please send an email to kirsten@ our company domain with a link to this comment and we'll discuss.

Off-topic, but can I compliment you/GitLab on a truly useful cookie notification popup? For me, that meets the spirit of the GDPR!

Great to hear!

The one thing I've experienced on this front that was clunky was integration between netlify and self-hosted Gitlab. If y'all could come up for a solution for that (which is prettier than "manual" deploy using webhook), I'd love both of your companies even more than I already do.

I just built a test site with Netlify + GitLab. Why must I give it full access to all of my GitLab repositories? I just want to deploy 1 repo. Seems like that opens up unnecessary possibilities for a security breach.

It's the only option with the current OAuth model, however, we only use the token generated in your web browser, and talk directly to GitLab's API from there. We use the token to add a deploy key and a webhook to the specific repository we're linking to, and after that it's discarded. That way there's no long lived token stored on our end that has access to your whole account.

Awesome. Great workaround. Thanks!

I don't like "+1" type comments, but this is a rare instance where I want to highly recommend Netlify. From support to performance, uptime and UI, they've been exceptional.

How does it compares against zeit now?

I found Netlify a few months ago and use them just for my blog currently. They are great though and would recommend them to anyone. It was trivial to get something setup with https with a Let's Encrypt certificate on my own domain, pushing to GitHub to update the site.

It's very simple to configure url rewriting and pre-rendering for SPAs. CxJS website (https://cxjs.io) and documentation is hosted on Netlify and it has been an amazing experience so far. We were on their single user $9 paid plan, but they switched us on the free tier with the pricing change some time ago.

Can you edit (say Jekyll blogs) on GitHub and them somehow push to Netlify automatically?

This is critical for me since I edit using my Android Jekyll-optimized tool Teddy Hyde (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EditorHyde...).

Yes, as soon as you commit, the site will get built and go live.

I host my Jekyll blog (zeph.co) on Netlify and can confirm that you can do this.

Netlify connects to GitHub and rebuilds your site automatically when a change is made in the master branch. There's no technical setup – you just connect to your GitHub account with their UI.

I used to use GitHub Pages to host my blog, but Netlify provides more features and it's also free.

Have you tried using Github pages for that? Really easy to setup Jekyll blogs there

Sure, but GitHub Pages is a relatively “dumb” host. You don’t get preview builds, branch deploys, and lots of other things. It’s nice for a minimal approach but for a large site with lots of people working on it I would not recommend it.

Is it all that different from hosting on S3 or Firebase or GitHub pages?

It's as difference from that as Dropbox is from mounting an NFS share on your computer.

Could you elaborate on the difference here? Mounting an NFS share is almost universally easier, in my experience.

/woosh

I think the commenter is referring to this infamous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Haha... I wasn't on Hacker News then, so I beg your forgiveness :)

That's funny, but as someone who still does not use drop box, NFS shares seem a lot easier to me than setting up drop box. I think I tried drop box once but I found it more onerous to log in than to type mount /mnt/nfs , so.... I guess I'm not the target market (and that's okay!).

Could you elaborate? That would be very helpful, the article doesn't quite detail ...

The end result is the same as hosting on S3 + CloudFront, it just saves you a lot of trouble setting things up, makes things just work, gives you nice features like lambdas, A/B testing, forms, authentication, etc etc for free, and just makes your life super easy.

Basically, if you have a repository with your Jekyll (or whatever) site, just add it to Netlify and that's it. It's served, and will automatically update when you push.

I have a Hugo site on github pages, and it's updated whenever I push. And no Netlify in the middle.

Funny enough I went from exactly that to gitlab+netlify setup. You get loads out of the box, HTTPS being the big one. In case you didn't get the reference, the other comment was the top comment for dropbox when it announced funding. In theory yes you can still roll your own dropbox, but we all have limited resources and dropbox and netlify make things so much easier that it's worth paying them money to do it right on the first try and not worry about maintenance.

Firebase does free certs on custom domains. Publish is a single command.

I use Netlify for website (https://www.primative.net), which is generated thanks to Hugo.

The ability to be able to publish using a simple `git push` and let them do all the work (including assets minification and bundling) is nothing short but amazing. Their dashboard is also really cool. Having the possibility to test a merge request without disrupting the live site, lock a deploy to a specific commit, or see the deployment live. It's simply amazing.

And their customer support is also great. Just yesterday I had a problem with Hugo not compiling my SCSS on their hand and I had two people trying to help me super quickly.

Netlify is a service I can't stop praising because they're just great on all fronts.

Ditto!

Netlify is one of those few products that feels like it Just Works(TM) which is rare to find!

Same. It's made my product design/prototyping/validation workflow insanely efficient. Really happy with it, and curious to explore some of the other features (like lambdas).

Couldn’t agree more. Started with hosting static sites directly on AWS with a combo of S3, CloudFront, Route51, etc. While it worked, Netlify is just so much nicer.

Git push done.

Now I use a combo or netlify plus aws lambda for functionality. Interested to see what they deliver next.

whoa

stavros.io is FAST. I'm sure Netlify deserves some credit but much of it belongs to your static approach and the decision not to load the page with 200 JS calls.

Thank you! Yes, I hate slow websites, I have removed as much as I could easily remove, mainly all the social crap. If you look closely, the social buttons are actually static images and links.

I’ve been using Netlify since at least 2015 and it’s invredible.

I’ve put a few small paying clients on their platform.

I hope they succeed!

Fantastic, quick website. Kudos. I'll be checking out Netlify, too.