April 2020 Summaries

Netlify Build Plugins are JavaScript files that allow developers to customize, automate, and control their build process. To use them, developers can enable plugins through the UI or by adding configuration files to their project's `netlify.toml` file. The plugins can be published on npm and installed in projects, allowing developers to pass inputs to the plugin using the `[plugins.inputs]` section of the configuration file. Build plugins can also handle errors, pull in project constants, and trigger specific events during the build process. Developers can run a build locally with the `netlify build --dry` command or execute a full build with `netlify build`. To disable plugins, developers can remove them from their `netlify.toml` file and navigate to the 'Build Plugins Beta' page in the Netlify UI. The series will cover how to create Build Plugins, making plugins, sharing plugins, and more, helping developers to customize and automate their builds with Netlify Build Plugins.

The Jamstack has seen rapid growth in popularity over the past five years, driven by its benefits of fast and secure websites. The shift away from monolithic web applications to a more decoupled architecture relying on microservices has been a significant catalyst for this growth. The Jamstack allows developers to focus on their own unique implementations, abstracting common tasks like authentication and data storage to external APIs developed by specialized experts. This has led to increased productivity and independence for developers, content authors, and marketers alike. The Jamstack architecture holds promise for a faster and leaner web, with companies of all sizes adopting it with success. As the ecosystem continues to evolve, we can expect to see further developments in edge technology, including custom functionality at edge nodes, which will unlock significant benefits for end users and developers.

This tutorial guides users on how to add a donation button to a Jamstack site using Stripe, allowing them to accept donations securely. The process involves creating a product on Stripe, obtaining a publishable key, and adding HTML and JavaScript code to display the donation button and handle payments. The tutorial also includes a demo website with test mode functionality, as well as instructions for testing and deploying the site to Netlify or other servers. Once live, users can start accepting real donations by switching their Stripe account to live mode and updating the publishable key. Additional resources are provided for further learning and implementation.

Ignore unnecessary builds to optimize your build times at Netlify, which intelligently checks for changes in a site's base directory by comparing files in the last known version to the latest updated version and automagically skips a build if no change is detected. However, this doesn't always work, especially with dependabot updates, where users have control over how and what gets built using the ignore setting in the configuration. Users can add an ignore attribute to their configuration to easily ignore unnecessary builds, such as ignoring dependabot updates by using Git log to surface changes in a commit and ignoring the build accordingly. This process helps conserve build minutes and is incredibly handy for building fast, making it a useful optimization technique for deployments.

When publishing a post on Contentful, it allows the site to rebuild automatically by triggering new builds when content updates through Netlify's webhooks, which accept HTTP POST requests. To set this up, configuration is required within both Contentful and Netlify, with steps including navigating to Build Hooks in Netlify Settings, adding a webhook in Contentful Settings, and selecting the endpoint URL from Netlify. Once configured, publishing or editing posts in Contentful will trigger a new build in the Netlify dashboard, pulling in content and publishing it to the site, providing an automatic deploy feature for the CMS.

Gatsby has released incremental builds to improve build performance by reducing the amount of work required to build a site. To enable Gatsby incremental builds on Netlify, users need to upgrade their Gatsby version, install cross-env, add the Gatsby Cache Netlify Build Plugin, and update their build command in package.json with the `GATSBY_EXPERIMENTAL_PAGE_BUILD_ON_DATA_CHANGES` flag. With these changes, Gatsby sites will only rebuild the parts of the site affected by changed data, resulting in faster builds and improved performance.

Netlify has opened registration for its Jamstack Conf virtual event, which will explore the future of Jamstack for various use cases, including new innovations, demos, and case studies. The event is free and will take place on May 27-28, with a focus on talks and workshops. Netlify also recently updated its Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities to restrict access to team members who use SSO, making it easier for businesses to manage their employees' access to the platform. Additionally, the company has released a new tutorial on how to migrate a WordPress website to the Jamstack architecture, as well as a post on best practices for scoping down pull requests in software development. Netlify is also welcoming its latest customers and highlighting its enterprise products. The company's logo has undergone a minor redesign, and it is now using the standardized spelling "Jamstack" across its materials. Furthermore, Netlify is encouraging users to provide feedback on its Jamstack survey, which aims to better understand the community's needs and preferences.

When selling products on a Jamstack site, Netlify Functions can be used to automate order fulfillment by sending an email to the fulfillment provider when a payment has been made. This tutorial uses Sendgrid to send transactional emails and demonstrates how to set up the project with environment variables, install dependencies, create a serverless function to receive the webhook event and send the email, verify the webhook signature, forward webhook events to a local server using the Stripe CLI, deploy to production by adding a new webhook endpoint in the Stripe Dashboard.

This is a summary of the text about deploying Nx monorepos to Netlify. Here's a neutral, objective, and interesting paragraph summarizing the key points: Netlify makes it easy to connect an existing Git repository to a URL and rebuild and re-deploy your app whenever you push commits. However, this can lead to unnecessary builds if only one project within the monorepo has changed. Rareș Matei, a JavaScript Architect, shares his experience deploying a simple React app in a monorepo to Netlify using Nx, a tool that analyzes the dependency graph and ensures that only affected projects are rebuilt. The author explains how to use Nx's "affected" command to identify which projects have changed and deploy only those projects. Additionally, they demonstrate how to set up a deployment workflow using Netlify Build Plugins, builders in Nx, and CircleCI to automate continuous deployments for the monorepo. By combining these tools, developers can ensure that their monorepos are deployed efficiently and effectively, without wasting resources on unnecessary builds.

This tutorial demonstrates how to integrate Contentful with a Vue.js application using the metaframework Nuxt. The process involves setting up a Contentful account, creating a new space, and defining the API structure and fields. It then outlines the steps for deploying the site on Netlify, including configuring environment variables and storing data in the `.env` file. The tutorial also covers how to bring in data from the Contentful API using Nuxt's `contentful` plugin, and how to use this data to render dynamic pages and posts within the Vue application. Throughout the process, the author provides detailed explanations of each step, along with code examples and guidance on customizing the setup to suit individual needs.

The Jamstack Conference is a virtual event that explores the pragmatic role of developers, devops, and the web in tackling the challenges of information equity in the digital age. The conference aims to cover topics such as traffic patterns, critical infrastructure, and future innovations in the Jamstack ecosystem. Keynote speakers include Christian Nwamba from Microsoft, Matt Biilmann from Netlify, and Laurie Voss. The event will also feature lightning launches, workshops, and a Jamstack survey to gather insights on use cases, scale, technology choices, frustrations, and benefits. Registration for the virtual conference is free, and sponsors have been substantially reframed to interact with attendees. The conference will take place from May 27-28, and more speakers, sponsors, and workshops will be announced in the coming weeks.

As a VP of Engineering, Dalia Havens shares her experience on remote work tips to improve productivity and team happiness. Effective communication is key, using tools like Zoom for video calls, Slack for messaging, and GitHub for code management. Setting clear goals, measuring results, prioritizing backlog, and documenting processes are also crucial for distributed teams. The importance of social time, break rooms, and slack channels cannot be overstated. Dalia also emphasizes the need to prioritize team well-being, set expectations for code review and turnaround times, and establish an engineering metrics practice. By following these tips, teams can stay connected, aligned, and productive in a remote work environment.

Static site generators (SSGs) are web development tools that generate static views of pages in advance, shifting the workload away from "request time" to "build time", and decoupling the number of visits to a site from the overhead of generating views. The tools have improved significantly over the years, with various languages and frameworks available, allowing developers to choose the one that best suits their development tastes and workflows. SSGs offer several advantages, including security, scalability, and performance, making them an attractive option for building sites that deliver content, applications, or large-scale projects. To find the best static site generator, consider the type of project, build process, and templating needs, ensuring a productive development experience that serves the users' needs.

Is it possible to sell products on the Jamstack? Absolutely! We can use Stripe Checkout and Netlify Functions to process payments and securely create Checkout sessions. To get started, we need to set up a new site for local development with Netlify, then create a serverless function that returns product data. We'll use JavaScript to load JSON data into an HTML page, and add styles to make the products look presentable. Next, we'll connect to Stripe and set up automatic deployments using the Netlify CLI. We'll also handle the product purchasing flow with Stripe Checkout, creating a success page to display after purchase. Finally, we'll test the checkout workflow and push the site to production.

You can significantly increase your terminal productivity by setting up aliases, which are shortcuts that allow you to execute a command more efficiently. Commonly used commands like `git add -A` and `git commit -m`, as well as searching for strings within directories, can be easily customized with aliases. To make these aliases work, you need to create a bash profile in your home directory, which is then sourced when you run the alias command. You can also customize the terminal output by enabling color output and adding custom aliases, such as `ls | lolcat` or `ls -la | lolcat`, to display files with colored information. By using aliases, you can streamline your workflow and make your terminal more visually appealing.

Eleventy is a static site generator that offers a low barrier to entry, allowing developers to quickly create and customize websites without shipping extra code. It provides features such as frontmatter for layouts, global data with the _data directory, overriding global data, grouping posts with tags, shared data for all files in a given directory, pagination built into collections, and creating pages from third-party data. Eleventy's flexibility and customization options make it an attractive option for developers looking to build fast, efficient, and scalable websites.

Netlify, a web development platform, was recently named to the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center's Enterprise Tech 30 list as one of the most promising mid-sized private companies in enterprise technology. The company was founded in 2015 and has received funding from prominent investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. Netlify provides a single workflow for managing build pipelines, continuous deployment, and hosting infrastructure, making it distinct from CDNs or cloud providers. With over 800,000 developers onboarding, Netlify is one of the fastest-growing web development platforms, and its recent $53M Series C funding led by EQT Ventures has further solidified its position in the industry.

Netlify has updated its redirect rule behavior to provide more predictability and consistency, particularly with the introduction of "forced" rules that override Netlify's implicit file shadowing. This change aims to enhance user experience by ensuring redirects behave as expected, reducing unpredictable behavior. The update will take effect on April 7th, and users are advised to check their site's redirects to ensure they behave as intended. With this new behavior, unforced redirect rules will load the original file if it exists, while forced rules will always redirect regardless of existing content.

The text discusses the benefits of pre-rendering content in a website, particularly for sites built using the Jamstack architecture. It introduces Scully, an Angular Static Site Generator (SSG) that allows developers to easily create and deploy static websites with Angular. The article guides readers through the process of setting up a new project, adding content, and integrating Scully to pre-render their site's content. With Scully, developers can take advantage of faster delivery, fewer security vulnerabilities, and immutable content, making it easier to manage and maintain their sites. The article concludes by providing resources for further learning and showcasing the completed project as an example of a pre-rendered static website built with Angular and Scully.

You have a step-by-step guide on deploying a Jekyll site to Netlify with continuous deployment, starting from installing Jekyll and preparing the project for GitHub, to connecting Netlify to GitHub and configuring deploy settings. The process involves several steps including creating a new repository on GitHub, initializing and adding files to the local repository, linking the local repository to Netlify, authorizing access between Netlify and GitHub, selecting the repository, configuring deploy settings, building the site, and deploying it to Netlify with continuous deployment capabilities.

The JAMstack, a software architecture, aims to abstract configuration in favor of a streamlined workflow where complexity can be built-in piecemeal or outsourced entirely. It seeks to reduce cognitive burden and enable developers to better reason about logic in their applications. The JAMstack's key components include Build Automation, Event Triggers/Webhooks, and Serverless Functions. These features allow for an automated build process, event-driven architecture, and scalable infrastructure, respectively. By leveraging these technologies, developers can create fast and secure sites with reduced complexity and cost.