Static Site Generators

Chapter 4. Deploying a Static Site

Once you’ve built your static site using the generator of your choice, it’s time to share it with the world. The good news is that, because these are static files, there’s no complicated database deployment or environment to set up. Deploying a static site is simple.

This simplicity also opens up a huge number of options. In this chapter, we’ll look at just a few of the deployment and hosting options available to you for your static site.

FTP

Since you are dealing with static assets—typically just HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images—deploying to just about any host via FTP requires no special setup. The only important thing to remember is that you need to build your site first; you do not upload the templates and Markdown.

Building Your Site

Some static site generators, like Jekyll, generate the site files whenever you preview the site. Nonetheless, it is best practice to do a build of the site before deploying. All of the static site generators have a build command of some form, often with some options. Let’s look at the process using the three generators we covered in the prior chapter.

In Jekyll, you’d use:

jekyll build

You can have Jekyll rebuild the site every time you make a change by adding -w to enable the watch option. For a full list of Jekyll build options, add --help.

In Wintersmith, you’d use:

wintersmith build

If you want to force Wintersmith to clear the output folder before building, use the -X option. For a full list of Wintersmith ...