Netlify Dev

Can anyone explain the elevator pitch of Netlify to me? I know it&#x27;s become quite popular in the last couple of years and I can&#x27;t figure out why. I don&#x27;t doubt that it&#x27;s good at what it does, but it seems to do the same thing as any number of services.<p>For example, I see a lot of people talk about it for static sites. But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on Amazon S3. What does Netlify do special that these others don&#x27;t? I&#x27;m not attempting to bash the service, I just want to understand what its killer features are.

Netlify is amazing:<p>1. Free 2. Good support 3. Custom domains with SSL 4. Takes care of most important backend stuff (forms and webhooks) 5. Functions (Lambda with zero config needed) 6. Abstracts server stuff like [redirects](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlify.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;redirects&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlify.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;redirects&#x2F;</a>)<p>Lambda and redirects are the best. I can just put my scripts in a folder and they automagically work.<p>In my LinkedIn profile my website address is not clickable, so people are copying it to browser. This gives me bogus source data, but with Netlify I can do a one-liner:<p>`&#x2F;li &#x2F;?utm_source=linkedin&amp;utm_medium=profile`<p>If you go to [patrykkalinowski.com&#x2F;li](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patrykkalinowski.com&#x2F;li" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patrykkalinowski.com&#x2F;li</a>) from my LI profile, you&#x27;ll end up on patrykkalinowski.com&#x2F;?utm_source=linkedin&amp;utm_medium=profile<p>Zero javascript redirects, zero nginx config, zero S3 settings - one line in text file, git push and I&#x27;m done!

Massive respect to the Netlify team. I played around with having my static site hosted by them (for free!) and got only a modicum of extra performance from a $5&#x2F;mo Digital Ocean droplet.<p>With this ngrok competitor making it easier to experiment with lambdas&#x2F;serverless technologies, they&#x27;re creating a compelling reason to use them for production builds.

Netlify service is ridiculously awesome. I host my site there for free and had some cert errors [1]. I messaged support and they had it fixed in less than 48 hrs. I seriously recommend others to use them rather than using Medium for their own content.<p>[1] www.powu3.com

More context in this blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlify.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;09&#x2F;netlify-dev--our-entire-platform-right-on-your-laptop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlify.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;09&#x2F;netlify-dev--our-ent...</a>

With our existing trend of moving everything to the cloud, I wonder why development environments aren&#x27;t going in the same direction as well. It has so many benefits. I code on my digital ocean server (vim and tmux) and it gives allot of the benefits that netlify mentions like streaming live. If I don&#x27;t have my computer I can just borrow anyone&#x27;s computer (or use a public computer in the library) to make quick fixes or even implement features, all of which will be immediately live even if I log out of the system. If my laptop is lost or damaged, I just get a replacement and pick up exactly where I left off. With tools like react native, I can also dabble with mobile development in the cloud.

Looks super cool and super happy with Netlify hosting.<p>I just gave it a spin though and got this:<p><pre><code> Netlify Dev ◈ Starting Netlify Dev... Netlify Dev ◈ Overriding dist with setting derived from netlify.toml [dev] block: null Netlify Dev ◈ No dev server detected, using simple static server Netlify Dev ◈ Unable to determine public folder for the dev server. Setup a netlify.toml file with a [dev] section to specify your dev server settings. </code></pre> But the blog post and the TOML reference (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlify.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;netlify-toml-reference&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netlify.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;netlify-toml-reference&#x2F;</a>) don&#x27;t seem to include details on what to include in the [dev] section of the TOML file to get this to work.<p>Anyone have this tool working locally?

I have no idea what this does. Site generator? functions? edge logic?<p>What?

I part run a non-profit site on Netlify and the experience is pretty great. The real killer bit for me has been their GitHub integration where they will render a preview build of any PRs put up to the site.

I love what Netlify is doing, but I&#x27;ve chosen to only watch it from afar for the past few years. I used to use a similar service that I loved very much called Divshot. But Google bought them, closed it down, and absorbed some of their tech for parts of the Firebase platform.<p>Now I use NearlyFreeSpeech.NET exactly because I do have to pay for it. I&#x27;m not sure how Netlify is able to offer their free tier. But I&#x27;ve learned the hard way that if you&#x27;re not paying for it, you&#x27;re not the customer.

Netlify has been pretty great so far. My team was able to use the promise of a super quick CMS integration with Netlify CMS to justify getting out of building another nasty WordPress site (what our editors are familiar with). The actual Netlify setup caused no trouble at all and let us seamlessly move off of GitHub Pages, and now we can put in an integrated build process with NPM or whatever else we need.<p>Netlify CMS itself is a lot more raw but I see huge potential there, especially since it&#x27;s open source. Our InfoSec folks loved the idea of content changes as commits. And the maintainers on Gitter are super open to help folks and work through changes. Already submitted a PR that was accepted and has made it into a release. And we haven&#x27;t paid them anything yet, even with Google Single Sign-On integrated.

For those interested in the GitHub integration &#x2F; preview pull request features that Netlify offers, but don&#x27;t want to migrate from your current host: I&#x27;m developing a product called FeaturePeek[1] that will spin up static builds into a feature environment you can share with your team &#x2F; publicly. Unlike Netlify Dev &#x2F; ngrok, you don&#x27;t need to be online with your feature branch checked out for others to preview it. We can run dynamic builds too, and are agnostic of your host or cloud provider because we don&#x27;t focus on production deployments. On top of that, we provide some collaboration tools so you can annotate &#x2F; comment directly on the build.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;featurepeek.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;featurepeek.com</a>

My friends have used netlify for dev deployments, and it worked out pretty well as a hosted solution.<p>For this product I&#x27;m wondering what does this give over, running setup and deployment scripts locally? Or running a VM connected to CI server that would run test and production deployment?

This is exciting news.<p>How do you see `netlify dev` comparing to `firebase serve`? The `--live` feature sounds great and I can imagine the config variables are handled better, but otherwise I&#x27;m anticipating a similar experience. Is that correct or am I missing something core?

We use Netlify for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standups.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standups.io</a> and we still are not paying a penny for their service. It works for our different environments, creates deploy previews out of every branch, supports split testing, and we even use it as a CI for our ReactJS app using Cypress! It&#x27;s so painless and reliable, we just love it.

This is brilliant! I like Netlify a lot. A lot of my day to day infrastructure work doesn&#x27;t rely on them, but I have used them for small sites here and there. Solid company!

I instantly thought of the incomplete&#x2F;error prone Zeit Now dev that was introduced a few weeks ago. If this(Netlify Dev) can replicate the entire system stably I might move on to Netlify Edge. Replicating and testing is a pretty big deal :-)<p>Offtopic, but can anyone explain the differences between Zeit Now v2 and Netlify Edge?

Fantastic service. We&#x27;ve moved some of our SPA&#x27;s out of our Heroku infrastructure and into Netlify. The integration with GitHub (and Slack), automated builds and deploys, together with the built-in support for rewrites and a reverse proxy works great and has made our workflow easier and faster.

Quote from the page:<p>“Decoupled web projects involve so many components. The hard part is testing all the pieces locally, together. Netlify Dev delivers this beautifully with one command.”<p>What are these &quot;decouples web projects&quot; and &quot;components&quot; and &quot;pieces&quot; that are hard to test locally, together?

I moved my blog from Medium to a static site hosted on Netlify&#x27;s free. I&#x27;m really, really impressed with Netlify.<p>A++++++ would recommend.

I recently moved my site[0] from WordPress to Netlify Used HUGO and then one of my Post regarding MacBook Thermals was trending on HN, The site had more than 12K visitors. If I had been using WordPress I could only imagine how catastrophic that would be. Though I crossed their 100GB limit. But since this was a rare spike in traffic I feel their free plan is very generous. Netlify+ static site generators is good alternative for WordPress. [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsid.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsid.io</a>

The comments here are so bizzarly positive for HN. Makes me feel that this might not be all genuine.

I’m curious if anyone has used both Netlify and AWS Amplify and if they can do a quick compare and contrast? In some ways they seem very similar, but their messaging seems fairly different.<p>Disclaimer: I’m a JAMstack n00b and the last real web app I built was “old school” where we did crazy things like keep a session token around and server the HTML, CSS, and JS from a web app. As such, I may be slow on the uptake.

Is this like working&#x2F;collaborating on glitch.com&#x2F;codesandbox (auto building, hot reloading) BUT being able to do it offline (train,plane dev) and then just push with one command ?<p>I guess i can see the value since i do realise im dependant to my internets connection to do some dev this last days (im a hacky ceo).

This appears to be the first &quot;Cloud Functions&quot; service to provide tools for testing functions locally.

Moved from Github Pages to Netlify this year and have never been happier. Will definitely give this a shot.

Netlify is just fantastic! I reluctantly checked them out last year, and am now hosting 3 SPAs there. By the far the most painless platform I’ve used, with a generous free tier.<p>Thanks to the team and great work as always!

Anybody found a good CMS solution for static sites?<p>I love everything about gatsby&#x2F;Hugo&#x2F;etc on Netlify but the lack of good CMS with out of the box SEO tools for writers to easily publish is a no go for my clients.<p>Tried Netlify CMS and it unfortunately required way too much work to compete with the full featured Wordpress setup my editorial clients are used to.

It has a few bugs to iron out.<p>I did a test to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trusting-heisenberg-a82012.netlify.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trusting-heisenberg-a82012.netlify.com&#x2F;</a> and I get &quot;Page Not Found Looks like you&#x27;ve followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn&#x27;t exist on this site.<p>Back to our site&quot;<p>Other than that, it is a neat idea.

Great move by Netlify.. they offer a lot of features such as asset optimization or authentication that can now be evaluated locally.<p>Currently I use netlify&#x27;s redirects in production and maintain equivalent nginx configs for dev parity and a fallback just in case.<p>I&#x27;m super happy with the netlify build&#x2F;edge products.

This looks interesting, but am I the only one turned off by having to ‘npm install’ to try it out?

My issue with netlify is the lack of data or analytics about traffic. I cannot even see the number of visits ! That&#x27;s why I use GitHub + cloudflare.

Looks a bit like Squarespace, which also offers Git based deployment. I use it for a number of client sites and it just works.

Agreed with others, Netlify is awesome. I deploy my personal Hugo site <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zwbetz.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zwbetz.com&#x2F;</a> to it, as well as all my Hugo themes

meanwhile the link is down..

based on the comments sounds like a great framework, but wow what a bad name. sounds like some kind of mix between bug zapper and a light beer? maybe life insurance also..

Can we please stop the personal promote-jerking?

I use netlify for about 6 out of 7 sites I manage for myself and family. The last one I have on linode purely out of laziness.<p>Netlify absolutely kills it with their entire suite of offerings. I highly highly recommend people try it out if they haven&#x27;t yet.

Great stuff!

Geocities 2.0