Heading Back to Netlify
12/2/2020
JournalWanted to throw this in the journal while it's hot and fresh in my memory. I've just moved from GitHub Pages back to Netlify, which I left behind for... reasons I'll recall in a sec. My current website hosting and deployment setup uses:
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- Netlify
- Namecheap
- Cloudflare
...and that's it. GitHub hosts the source code for thombruce.com privately, GitHub Actions is responsible for the build which gets pushed to a 'production' branch, Netlify simply deploys the pre-built 'production' branch, I use Namecheap to manage my domain and Cloudflare to manage the DNS records which point to Netlify (as well as having MX records for GSuite Gmail).
The reason I don't use Netlify's build pipeline is just that it isn't as configurable as GitHub Actions, and I cannot configure it to fetch private Git respositories as part of the build. That's the reason I moved away in the first place, before realising what I probably should have all along: I can just have Netlify deploy a branch (or directory) as is - the build doesn't actually need to run on Netlify so long as I store the build results in a branch (or directory), just as I had been doing for GitHub Pages.