
Netlify Dev - cift
https://www.netlify.com/products/dev/
======
Touche
Can anyone explain the elevator pitch of Netlify to me? I know it's become
quite popular in the last couple of years and I can't figure out why. I don't
doubt that it's good at what it does, but it seems to do the same thing as any
number of services.

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't? I'm not attempting to bash
the service, I just want to understand what its killer features are.

~~~
seanwilson
> But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on
> Amazon S3.

I've been really happy using Netlify (with Jekyll) for
[https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/) \- I didn't have to think
about server admin at all when I got traffic spikes from Hacker News and
Product Hunt traffic, and development features make working on the website
really straightforward.

Features I like:

\- Git based deploys automatically when you make a commit

\- Git based rollbacks if there's a problem with the latest commit

\- non-master Git branches are automatically deployed for preview

\- automatic CDN + HTTPS setup

\- no servers to admin i.e. they deal with security, scaling and configuration
for you

\- they do instant cache invalidation of images/CSS/JS files for you so
there's no stale files being served after deploys

\- before deploying you can run complex build scripts on Netlify to generate
files to be deployed e.g. any static site generator you want to use, run
arbitrary NPM scripts, you can download data that to be rendered on to a page

\- you can use Netlify CMS as a friendly web interface to edit blog posts,
articles and FAQs. It's easy enough for non-technical people so it's possible
to use for standard business websites that would normally require something
more complex to admin like WordPress.

You can cobble together something like the above yourself but Netlify makes it
simple and robust so you can get on with more important things.

People that say you can do something similar with e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet
are missing the point and are for sure paying with their time. If you've
worked in web dev for a while you've probably tried to automate many of the
above features yourself but it's just never going to be as robust as a service
that has a dedicated support team behind it.

~~~
brianpgordon
If you're not aware, you get most of that for free with GitHub pages:

[https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

It deploys when you push, is based on Jekyll, and GitHub handles all of the
hosting/HTTPS/caching themselves.

~~~
davchana
Gitlab too does this, along with free unlimited private repos & published
static sites; html n Jekyll n all. Just a happy user.

~~~
dsumenkovic
Glad to hear that you enjoy using GitLab! Here's a link if anyone wondered
[https://about.gitlab.com/product/pages/](https://about.gitlab.com/product/pages/)

------
pkalinowski
Netlify is amazing:

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]([https://www.netlify.com/docs/redirects/](https://www.netlify.com/docs/redirects/))

Lambda and redirects are the best. I can just put my scripts in a folder and
they automagically work.

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:

`/li /?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=profile`

If you go to
[patrykkalinowski.com/li]([https://patrykkalinowski.com/li](https://patrykkalinowski.com/li))
from my LI profile, you'll end up on
patrykkalinowski.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=profile

Zero javascript redirects, zero nginx config, zero S3 settings - one line in
text file, git push and I'm done!

~~~
soonoutoftime
> 1\. Free ... 4. Takes care of most important backend stuff (forms and
> webhooks)

From my reading of
[https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#forms](https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#forms)
you will need to pay $19/month/site (!) just to collect the data from 1000
form submissions. By the time you have a couple of sites like this the price
is already way too much for me and anyone else with basic backend knowledge. I
hope I've misunderstood.

~~~
V3loxy
For a static site, I think 100 submissions/month for free is probably more
than enough for the majority of people. Though going straight to $19/month is
a pretty big step if you're just hosting your own personal website/blog.

It's $0,019 per submission, which I think is a fair price if you're actually
sending that amount (and making money from it). It would costs you much more
to build unless. That said, for personal (free) use there are a lot of
alternative options.

------
Eiriksmal
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/mo Digital Ocean droplet.

With this ngrok competitor making it easier to experiment with
lambdas/serverless technologies, they're creating a compelling reason to use
them for production builds.

~~~
SahAssar
How is this a ngrok competitor?

~~~
gk1
Netlify Dev has a live sharing feature to let others view the site on your
local environment.

------
syntaxing
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.

[1] www.powu3.com

~~~
amrrs
Lately, I've been thinking to Port my Medium posts to Netlify. Could you
please suggest any reason why you specifically mentioned this case ?

~~~
syntaxing
Better control and domain ownership. Especially since setting up a static site
is super easy with Netlify. Set up a repo in either GitHub and Gitlab and
Netlify will take care of the rest. The biggest downside is that it's hard to
get exposure. However, it works for me since my site is just a portfolio site.

~~~
anderspitman
If you want to go further down this rabbit hole:
[https://indieweb.org/POSSE](https://indieweb.org/POSSE)

------
gk1
More context in this blog post:
[https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/04/09/netlify-dev--our-
ent...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/04/09/netlify-dev--our-entire-
platform-right-on-your-laptop/)

------
songzme
With our existing trend of moving everything to the cloud, I wonder why
development environments aren'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't
have my computer I can just borrow anyone'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.

~~~
woutr_be
What's your setup like? I've been looking around to set something like this
up, mainly for being able to do quick fixes on the go. (Or use my iPad when
I'm on holiday)

~~~
songzme
Unfortunately I don't have much to share because my setup is so simple.
Literally just vim (you can find really awesome vimrc on GitHub, mines pretty
messy), and tmux (simple apt install).

When I visit my friends place I usually just use their computer, otherwise
I'll use my MacBook pro or desktop. I don't think about setup much, I just use
whatever devices around me to access and write code on my server instance.

~~~
woutr_be
Understood, for my purposes I was really looking for a more full-fletched dev
environment. Being able to run a local dev server and a browser (for front-end
dev). Sadly that doesn't seem to be possible on an iPad at the moment.

------
everdev
Looks super cool and super happy with Netlify hosting.

I just gave it a spin though and got this:

    
    
      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.
    

But the blog post and the TOML reference
([https://www.netlify.com/docs/netlify-toml-
reference/](https://www.netlify.com/docs/netlify-toml-reference/)) don't seem
to include details on what to include in the [dev] section of the TOML file to
get this to work.

Anyone have this tool working locally?

~~~
swyx
hello! thanks for the report! i just pushed a small patch that now has some
more helpful messages.. havent ironed out all the states yet and probably need
a state machine since i already cant keep everything in my head!

[https://github.com/netlify/netlify-dev-
plugin/commit/1c6df00...](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-dev-
plugin/commit/1c6df0038ce48f5899ef405c14797bf4ac905fa3)

------
d--b
I have no idea what this does. Site generator? functions? edge logic?

What?

~~~
icebraining
It runs their platform on your laptop. If you want to know what "their
platform" is, you can just click on the Products link.

Essentially, it takes your code (from a repository), runs a build command (if
configured), and serves the result over HTTP on some domain.

~~~
mattfrommars
Isn't this something which you can do with Jenkins? Pull code from Github and
deploy it on S3 bucket?

I learned Jenkins creating the pipeline to AWS in less than a day.

~~~
icebraining
Yes, but here you don't need to manage a Jenkins installation.

~~~
mattfrommars
Right. But in this system, I'll need to manage Netlify.

~~~
qfarhan
To be honest, there is nothing to manage in Netlify. Just first time connect
the git repo during sign up procedure. Additional benefits (at least for
starter) are 1 click SSL management. They also provide functions and form, but
I have not used them so not aware of how useful they are. :)

Sure they are not a huge improvement compared to your setup. But streamlining
the procedure for someone not familiar with the pipeline is a great benefit.

------
Slippery_John
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.

------
Lowkeyloki
I love what Netlify is doing, but I'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.

Now I use NearlyFreeSpeech.NET exactly because I do have to pay for it. I'm
not sure how Netlify is able to offer their free tier. But I've learned the
hard way that if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.

------
ltrcola
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.

Netlify CMS itself is a lot more raw but I see huge potential there,
especially since it'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't paid them anything yet, even with
Google Single Sign-On integrated.

------
andrethegiant
For those interested in the GitHub integration / preview pull request features
that Netlify offers, but don't want to migrate from your current host: I'm
developing a product called FeaturePeek[1] that will spin up static builds
into a feature environment you can share with your team / publicly. Unlike
Netlify Dev / ngrok, you don'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't focus on production
deployments. On top of that, we provide some collaboration tools so you can
annotate / comment directly on the build.

[1] [https://featurepeek.com](https://featurepeek.com)

~~~
webo
>you don't need to be online with your feature branch checked out

Can you expand on what do you mean by this?

~~~
andrethegiant
The `netlify dev --live` command opens up a tunnel to your local dev server
port. If you close your laptop, the connection closes. Similarly, if you
switch branches, the content of your build will change, even though the URL
you've shared remains the same.

------
prolepunk
My friends have used netlify for dev deployments, and it worked out pretty
well as a hosted solution.

For this product I'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?

~~~
gk1
For one, there is nothing to configure with Netlify Dev.

~~~
prolepunk
But the configuration needs to come from somewhere, like existing netlify
config?

I noticed that one of the features mentioned is this --

> Netlify Dev automatically detects common tools like Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll,
> React Static, Eleventy, and more, providing a zero-config setup for your
> local dev server.

If your framework supported by netlify, just plop the projects with no
configuration.

I found one or two Python projects supported by netlify --
[https://www.netlify.com/tags/python/](https://www.netlify.com/tags/python/)

It looks like Netlify caters to frontend development, as far as backend,
mostly static site generators supported.

I would try this out for Vue.js

------
colinsidoti
This is exciting news.

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'm anticipating a similar experience. Is that correct
or am I missing something core?

------
jpincheira
We use Netlify for [https://standups.io](https://standups.io) 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's so painless and
reliable, we just love it.

~~~
skrebbel
Can you explain more? I mean, I see that you're essentially a video service.
Don't you have a backend? Don't people login? How do you handle all that on a
static site host?

~~~
jpincheira
Sure, happy to expand on it.

You're right, as a video service, we cannot do everything through them, we use
our own encoder service with AWS Lambda, and manage users through a NodeJS
app. And Netlify is a very important part of our stack, as it holds our main
client app, which connects to these other parts of our stack.

Btw, congrats on TalkJS! Looks amazing.

------
joduplessis
This is brilliant! I like Netlify a lot. A lot of my day to day infrastructure
work doesn't rely on them, but I have used them for small sites here and
there. Solid company!

------
pcr910303
I instantly thought of the incomplete/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 :-)

Offtopic, but can anyone explain the differences between Zeit Now v2 and
Netlify Edge?

~~~
k__
Yes, I have the feeling the whole "replicate locally" goes in the wrong
direction.

You're just lying to yourself when saying local is the same as cloud...

~~~
icebraining
Why? They're just computers, what makes your local machine _that_ different
from a Netlify server?

~~~
k__
Because functions are small self-contained stateless bits of code, they don't
need much testing by themselves.

You need to test them with the services they are using and replicating your
whole cloud infrastructure locally is nearly impossible.

~~~
icebraining
Maybe they'll tell me I'm wrong, but Netlify strikes me as not targeting
people who need a "whole cloud infrastructure" (since they don't offer many
services), but a static site with a few simple backend functions.

~~~
k__
Cloud be, yes.

------
rvanmil
Fantastic service. We've moved some of our SPA'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.

------
kyberias
Quote from the page:

“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.”

What are these "decouples web projects" and "components" and "pieces" that are
hard to test locally, together?

------
forrestthewoods
I moved my blog from Medium to a static site hosted on Netlify's free. I'm
really, really impressed with Netlify.

A++++++ would recommend.

------
thatssosid
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]
[https://bsid.io](https://bsid.io)

~~~
poxrud
With proper caching even a $5 DO droplet would be easily able to handle this
load. With caching + cdn you should be able to handle virtually any load. I
personally run cloudfront in front of all of my WP sites, even the low traffic
ones because the costs are negligible.

~~~
thatssosid
I agree that DO would handle the load. The con is that it costs 5$+tax. Where
as netlify is free and CDN and caching is taken care by netlify. Saves time

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

~~~
mbanerjeepalmer
Check comment history for a sample of the positive commenters?

I mean, I could tell you that I too love Netlify with a passion but that would
make it even more suspicious. But trust me, it's great. Try it for yourself.

------
Lightbody
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.

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.

~~~
kall
Netlify is focused on delivering your frontend and has some light backend
features added on (form submission, lambda functions, auth). But you can't run
a dynamic application on just netlify, because there is no database. But you
might not need a database, which I think is netlify's proposition.

AWS Amplify is focused on providing you a backend (with GraphQL) powered by
AWS services (dynamoDB, lambda). You can run an entire dynamic application
with just AWS amplify. They also provide frontend hosting now, but that part I
haven't used (oops that was your core question sorry). It seems that the CLI
tool just configures S3 and CloudFront for you. This is probably much less
polished then using netlify.

~~~
zenithm
Netlify has integration with FaunaDB for the database tier.

~~~
kall
FaunaDB looks like a great product for a serverless/SPA type app but I don't
see how they are integrated with netlify other than they fit together well?

~~~
jchanimal
FaunaDB support is built into Netlify Dev and was shown in the Netlify CEO’s
keynote at the JAMstack conf. Netlify also has one-click deploy support for
including FaunaDB with your applications. For instance this sample app can be
deployed almost automatically: [https://github.com/sw-yx/netlify-fauna-
todo](https://github.com/sw-yx/netlify-fauna-todo) (Disclaimer, I work for
Fauna and helped with the one-click deploy integration.)

------
lucasverra
Is this like working/collaborating on glitch.com/codesandbox (auto building,
hot reloading) BUT being able to do it offline (train,plane dev) and then just
push with one command ?

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).

------
mleonhard
This appears to be the first "Cloud Functions" service to provide tools for
testing functions locally.

~~~
siphor
firebase and google cloud functions?

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

------
Karupan
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.

Thanks to the team and great work as always!

------
pembrook
Anybody found a good CMS solution for static sites?

I love everything about gatsby/Hugo/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.

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.

~~~
navs
[https://forestry.io/](https://forestry.io/) (hugo)

[https://www.contentful.com/](https://www.contentful.com/) (used this with
jekyll)

~~~
codemati
+1 for Contentful with Gatsby. Painless setup.

------
eruci
It has a few bugs to iron out.

I did a test to [https://trusting-
heisenberg-a82012.netlify.com/](https://trusting-
heisenberg-a82012.netlify.com/) and I get "Page Not Found Looks like you've
followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn't exist on this site.

Back to our site"

Other than that, it is a neat idea.

------
tln
Great move by Netlify.. they offer a lot of features such as asset
optimization or authentication that can now be evaluated locally.

Currently I use netlify's redirects in production and maintain equivalent
nginx configs for dev parity and a fallback just in case.

I'm super happy with the netlify build/edge products.

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

~~~
sjbrown
Yeah, I wish it were just a docker image up on the hub

~~~
hombre_fatal
That "just" is just your favorite alternative to "npm install". There's
nothing "just" about it. Like preferring it was a pip or apt install.

~~~
larrywright
Sure there is. When I’m done looking at it, I delete the Docker image and it’s
gone from my system. That’s more effort with npm.

Also, the docker solution works for _everything_. So whether it’s a node app,
or python, or Go, or Ruby... the process is the same.

~~~
tln
Getting a docker image to performantly access a local folder across platforms
is a huge challenge.

I love docker but it's just not good enough at handling watched folders.

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

~~~
navs
Is that something that could be solved with Google Analytics, Mixpanel?

~~~
elcomet
Google analytics gives very bad results, given the number of people using
content blockers. I just want the number of unique visitors, I don't care
about tracking or anything.

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

------
zwbetz
Agreed with others, Netlify is awesome. I deploy my personal Hugo site
[https://zwbetz.com/](https://zwbetz.com/) to it, as well as all my Hugo
themes

------
clrsky
meanwhile the link is down..

------
SonicSoul
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..

------
huxflux
Can we please stop the personal promote-jerking?

------
kadendogthing
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.

Netlify absolutely kills it with their entire suite of offerings. I highly
highly recommend people try it out if they haven't yet.

~~~
hombre_fatal
I was blown away by how polished it was once I finally tried it a few months
ago. I set up auto-deploy on push to Github + build command in like two clicks
for all of my projects and never looked back.

Their free tier is probably too generous though. I know someone running the
biggest website in a massive niche and they are serving their SPA for free
from Netlify.

~~~
frosted-flakes
Well, without their free tier they probably wouldn't be as big as they are
today. It's the same model as freemium apps: get big, then start charging.

~~~
hombre_fatal
You justified a free tier but not why it's still free for one of the most
trafficked websites in the world. ;)

~~~
kamkha
Their free tier has a 100GB/month bandwidth cap — surely the most trafficked
websites in the world would very quickly hit that limit, no?

Your point stands nonetheless — they could certainly be losing money on
certain large users of their free tier. Serving relatively static content
_has_ gotten extremely cheap across the board, though, and like the parent
said, they might be benefiting from the pricing by more indirect means.

~~~
graemebenzie
Aren't they just burning through VC cash as they suck up all the devs?

------
zframroze
Great stuff!

------
huxflux
Geocities 2.0

