Netlify’s “Continuous Deployment” Feature, Do You Know?
November 2017, ThoughtWorks Technology Radar captured Netlify as a platform to be assessed. The radar says “ You can create static website content, check it into GitHub and then quickly and easily get your site live and available”.
In this post, let me describe my first assessment for Netlify, especially its “Continuous Deployment” feature.
Creating Demo Site
First of all, I have created a site named “veltra-iwamoto-demo”. The repository is https://github.com/vt-iwamoto/netlify-demo.
Production Branch and Production Deploy
Next, I have set the “master” branch as the “Production branch”. By this setting, when I push my code to “master” branch, Netlify will deploy it to https://veltra-iwamoto-demo.netlify.com/.
Netlify calls this feature “Production deploy”. I think this feature is common in platforms for static websites.
Branch Deploy
Next, I have set the “staging” branch as one of the “Branch deploys”. By this setting, when I push my code to “staging” branch, Netlify will deploy it to https://staging--veltra-iwamoto-demo.netlify.com/.
I think this feature is useful because we can have multiple environments, such as “development”, “test” and “staging”. If we choose paid plans, we will be able to use Selective password protection.
Deploy Preview
“Deploy Preview” feature is enabled without any setting. By this feature, when I create new pull request to my production branch or to one of the “Branch deploys” branches, Netlify will automatically deploy a preview.
I have tried this feature by the following procedure.
- I have pushed a new feature to “feature/1” branch
- I have created pull request #1 to “staging” branch
- Netlify has deployed the preview to https://deploy-preview-1--veltra-iwamoto-demo.netlify.com/
- Yay!
I think this feature is powerful because we can get previews of each pull requests. Accessing a preview, we may discover bugs that we could not notice in code review.
Conclusion
“Deploy Preview” feature should be an enough reason to use Netlify. To learn more details, such as “Build command”, please refer the document:
