Working with Static Sites

Chapter 7. Deployment

Raymond Camden

One of the biggest selling points of static sites is that their production requirements are essentially nil. But even with the minimal requirements for supporting a static site, there are still multiple options for developers to choose from.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the various ways you can take those simple, static files from your development machine and make them available to the world at large. Which you use depends entirely on your needs.

Plain Old Web Servers

Probably the simplest and most familiar solution is to make use of the same old web servers we’ve been using for the past 20 or so years. The two most popular options are the HTTP server from Apache and IIS from Microsoft. Apache is available on multiple platforms, while IIS is only available on Windows.

In both cases, if you have the server set up, “deployment” is simply a matter of copying the output from your static site generator into the web root (or a relevant subdirectory) for your server.

It is likely that you don’t want to manually copy files every time, so you could look into tools that make that process easier, like Grunt and Gulp. Or you can simply use an old-school shell script or BAT file.

There’s nothing special about this setup and nothing else really to say, and that’s a good thing!

Cloud File Storage Providers

Most developers are probably aware of cloud services provided by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others, that provide basic file storage. The idea ...