JavaScript Everywhere

Chapter 17. Deploying a Web Application

When I first began doing web development professionally, a “deployment” meant uploading files from my local machine to a web server through an FTP client. There weren’t any build steps or pipelines, meaning that the raw files on my machine were the same as those on my web server. If something went wrong, I would either frantically try to fix the issue or roll back the change by replacing it with copies of the old files. This wild west approach worked OK at the time, but also led to a lot of site downtime and unexpected issues.

In today’s world of web development, the needs of our local development environment and our web servers are quite different. On my local machine, I want to see instant changes when I update a file and have uncompressed files for debugging. On my web server, I only expect to see changes when I deploy them and value small file sizes. In this chapter, we’ll look at one way that we can deploy a static application to the web.

Static Websites

A web browser parses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to generate the web pages that we interact with. Unlike frameworks such as Express, Rails, and Django, which generate the markup for a page server-side at the time of the request, static websites are simply a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript stored on a server. This can range in complexity from a single HTML file containing markup to complicated frontend build processes that compile templating languages, multiple JavaScript files, ...