I have a new update regarding my website. My old workflow was as follows

  • Make changes to some aspect of website on local machine
  • Compile the website, using previously Jekyll, now Hugo
  • Copy that rendered site directory to a bucket in Google Cloud
  • Remote in to server, copy folder into content directory from bucket
  • Purge Cache from Cloudflare

I was researching ways to possibly automate this process, either using git, or Hugo’s inbuilt deploy feature. If I had set up my server this way to begin with, then it would have worked wonderfully, as GCP allows for git deployments on their servers. This would have also taken quite a bit of time to set up, as I would need to create a new VM instance, and set everything back up to use those tools. While this would have been a great learning experience, its a little too much for a static site.

In comes Netlify. It uses a CDN and allows for building sites directly from git. Under its free tier, I’m allowed 300 build minutes, and 100 GB of data transfer. With my current site, this is more than plenty for all of the bots that visit.

This also is a great way to automate my process, which is now

  • Make changes to local site
  • git push to Gitlab
  • Netlify Builds site automatically
  • ???
  • Profit!

I can also add a custom domain to Netlify, basically migrating completely away from Google Cloud and Cloudflare. I am still going to retain my Google Cloud server, but just turn it off, allowing for a live backup, or if I ever want to mess around with some other cloud services that Google offers.