I’m in the process of migrating this blog from Managed WordPress on GoDaddy to Eleventy, GitHub and Netlify. Since I like the convenience of writing content in WordPress, I decided to continue to use it, but just as a headless CMS. When 11ty builds the site, it would fetch WordPress post, page, category, tag, and author data and, using the eleventy-fetch plugin, cache the data locally for a customizable period (I chose 1 day). Since Netlify automatically triggers a build when it detects a commit or push to GitHub, an automated build only happens when I make changes that are tracked by git and not changes in WordPress. For WordPress changes that I want published, I would manually trigger a build in the Netlify admin panel.
During this migration project, there were coding bugs that needed to be fixed. Following are some of the ways I discovered helped me to debug in Eleventy.
Debugging data in JavaScript files in the _data folder
As mentioned above, my project fetches data from WordPress to dynamically build pages. For example, I have a file at _data/authors.js that fetches data from the WordPress remote API endpoint, does some custom processing, and returns the data. It is often necessary to see if the data at different points of the code is as expected. To see this data, you can simply console out the data variable (see line 53 in the screenshot below).
When 11ty builds the site, the console.log statement will output the data in the console / terminal. However, f you are running the default 11ty build command, depending on how many files are being built (in my case, 11ty wrote 1015 files), the data dump may get truncated or lost in the console output. To remove the noise and status messages in the 11ty output, enable quiet mode. Since I’m on Windows, I use the following command.
npx @11ty/eleventy --serve --incremental --quiet
Now, the output is much simpler, and I can see the data dump immediately.
Debugging data in template files
If you’d like to view the value of data variables in template files, you can do that by outputting the value and passing it to the log function (see example on line 9 below). This will tell 11ty to output the data to the console / terminal.
Dumping all data to a built page
Viewing data in the console terminal is handy for some situations. But, sometimes you can have a lot of JSON data that you’d like to see. In this case, it can be easier to dump the data to a page that you can view the entirety of in a file or at a URL To do this, first add a filter with the following code to .eleventy.js.
eleventyConfig.addFilter('dump', obj => {
const getCircularReplacer = () => {
const seen = new WeakSet();
return (key, value) => {
if (typeof value === "object" && value !== null) {
if (seen.has(value)) {
return;
}
seen.add(value);
}
return value;
};
};
return JSON.stringify(obj, getCircularReplacer(), 4);
});
Then, create a file to dump the data. In the example below, I have 2 files.
I wanted to find a glue that was simple to use, not too expensive, was very strong, and would maintain its strength in wet conditions. There are many glue options to choose from. I ended up choosing two popular brands: Liquid Nails and Loctite. For each brand, I chose either the strongest option or the option that was designed for wet environments. I didn’t include epoxy in my test because I didn’t want to mix two parts together and apply the mixture using a stick. Below are the two options I chose.
I first glued a piece of 2×4 to a concrete landscape block.
After waiting 1.5 to 2 days to fully cure, I attached each piece of wood to a chain to suspend the wood / concrete block combo in the air.
After 2 days, both adhesives kept the wood attached to the concrete block. I then wanted to see if water would affect the bond. I submerged each test in water without having it touch the bottom of the bucket of water.
LeftL Fuze-it | Right: PL Marine
After 12 hours, the wood pieces were still connected to the concrete blocks. But, after 23 hours, the Liquid Nails Fuze-It MAX lost its strength and the wood piece became disconnected from the concrete block.
Left: Fuze-It MAX, Right: PL Marine
So, the winner is Loctite PL Marine, although if you are gluing something in a dry environment, Liquid Nails Fuze-It MAX is probably sufficient. Unsurprisingly, the Marine adhesive is stronger both in dry and wet environments, including while being completely submerged in water.
As a web developer, I absolutely need multiple windows open – maybe more than for people in other professions. Due to the pandemic, like many people, I had to create a home office. I could have used the unused loft upstairs but I didn’t know I’d still be working from home after 2 years and I like being close to the kitchen so I converted the dining table into my work desk. Since I had some old monitors lying around, I used them to have multiple windows open. I thought we’d all just work from home for a month or two max so it didn’t seem worth it to spend money on fancy monitors.
April 2020
As the pandemic progressed, I got a work allowance to buy office equipment for work from home (WFH). I badly needed an ergonomic and comfy work chair. I also got an ultrawide monitor to have even more screen real estate.
This photo does not show the upgraded chair.
I thought about using my 65″ inch LG OLED TV as a monitor but the screen was WAY TOO BIG!
I then read an article about people using 43″ and 50″ TVs with a low input delay as their work monitor and how happy they’ve been. I got the Samsung 50″ ‘The Frame” TV at a 50% open-box discount at BestBuy. As much as it was nice reading code on it, anything on the left and right was uncomfortable to read.
I could have tried the 43″ model of the same TV but it cost more than I wanted to spend. Plus, I wanted more windows open at the same time. Fortunately, BestBuy had some open-box 32″ Samsung UJ59 4K monitors. Regular price: $340. Sale Price: $300. Open box price: $250 and $195 (both looked brand new even though they were open box items). After being tired of a messy dining room / office where I could see the back of my monitors, I decided to rearrange the dining room and get a more suitable desk.
I know what you’re thinking. Why is the laptop halfway off the desk. Since with two 4K monitors, I didn’t think I needed the laptop screen but, how can I resist an extra screen? I’ll get a drawer unit the same height as the desk, put it on the left side of the desk, and put the laptop on it. More importantly: why in the world didn’t I buy two 4K monitors before? This setup makes working so much better I regret not doing this sooner. Now, this setup works for me but you may need to adjust some settings to better suit yours.
Setting up the monitors
Before you go out and buy a bunch of 4K monitors, make sure you laptop / computer supports them. I have a MacBook Pro (2019) and according to Apple, I can run multiple 4K monitors.
My particular Samsung UJ59 monitors don’t have USB-C input – only HDMI – so I have to use a USB-C to HDMI adapter.
Monitor Layout
On MacOS, I chose to have my laptop screen be my main display and my 32″ monitors both be extended displays. You can then drag the squares representing screens to match your physical layout so that when you drag your mouse (I use a trackpad) off the edge of a screen/monitor, the pointer seamlessly appears on the adjacent screen, as you’d expect.
Monitor Resolution
4K screens/TV support a native resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. But, you may find that reading code or blog posts difficult when the font is too small. There are two things you can do to address this:
Scale down the resolution
You can have your monitor show a picture at a lower than 4K resolution such that everything appears bigger.
I set my laptop as the main display with a default resolutionThe first 4K monitor is set as “Extended display” with a default (4K) resolutionThe 2nd 4K monitor is also set as “Extended display” with a default resolution. When I click the “Scaled” option, you can see the default resolution is 3840 x 2160, which is 4K.
Below are lower scaling options.
The scaling option right below 4K is 3360 x 1890 px.The lowest scaling option is 1920 x 1080 px.
Increase the font size of some or all browser tabs / apps
If you’re in 4K mode and you feel the font is a bit too small to read, you can increase the font size of just that window or browser tab. I use VisualStudio Code as my code editor and I find that increasing the font size makes for a much more pleasant coding experience. Plus, since I have laid out my screen such that VS Code takes up the full height of the screen, I can still see a ton of code without having to scroll a lot.
Conclusion
One survey indicated that slightly more people preferred a single 4K TV as their monitor than people who prefer multiple 4K monitors. This all boils down to your use case. If you don’t need a million windows open like I do, then a single 43″ 4K TV may be better for you (don’t get a 50″ TV – it’s too big if you are sitting 2-3′ from the screen). Otherwise, multiple 4K monitors is definitely the way to go (with some custom setting adjustments to suit your viewing comfort).
This post will describe how to create a simple website with 11ty (Eleventy), a NodeJS-based static site generator (SSG). According to this article, 11ty is the 3rd-fastest SSG.
I’ve tried Hugo. It’s definitely fast and easy to install. But, I found that it wasn’t flexible in how it could be used and not as intuitive as Jekyll and 11ty. I’ve also tried Jekyll. It was a bit tricky to install on Windows. It would sometimes get stuck or not detect file changes and therefore not build and reload them in the browser. LiveReload didn’t work, for me at least. 11ty was super easy to install, as you’ll see below. It’s super flexible, customizable, and intuitive to use. And, it supports a bunch of templating engines like HandlebarsJS, Liquid, Nunjucks, EJS, and even plain JavaScript.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting started with 11ty to build a simple website from scratch. This tutorial was done on Windows.
If you’re on Windows, open the Command Prompt and run node -v to check the version of Node installed.
Optionally, install the latest version of PowerShell
If you’re on Windows, you can use the default command prompt. Or, you can use PowerShell. If you don’t have the latest version of PowerShell, you can download it from here. You can also install Windows Terminal.
Instead of the default command prompt (cmd.exe), I’m going to use PowerShell. Open PowerShell and run node -v to check your version of Node installed. If PowerShell doesn’t find Node, then check that Node is in your path.
Open System Properties
Click Environment Variables
Under System variables, click Path.
If there is no path to the nodejs folder, add it as the last item.
If it exists but comes before the PowerShell path, then move it down below the PowerShell path.
Close and reopen PowerShell and rerun node -v.
Create a website folder
mkdir eleventy-poc
cd eleventy-poc
Create a package.json file
npm init -y
Install eleventy and save it in package.json
At the time of this writing, the latest release version is 1.0.2. However, I will install version 2.0.0 canary because it has new features that I like.
npm install --save-dev @11ty/eleventy@canary
Run eleventy (verify it runs)
npx @11ty/eleventy
Install HTML 5 boilerplate
We’ll use HTML5 Boilerplate as a basis for our website. Go to https://html5boilerplate.com/ and download the latest version.
Extract and copy all files to the project folder (eleventy-poc) EXCEPT for package.json and package-lock.json. You don’t want to overwrite the 11ty dependencies that were already saved there.
Create an “src” folder
To keep our source files separate from root-level environment files (package.json, .env, .gitignore, etc), let’s create an src folder to store our website source files and move the following files and folders into it.
css
img
js
404.html
browserconfig.xml
favicon.ico
icon.png
index.html
humans.txt
robots.txt
site.webmanifest
tile.png
tile-wide.png
The docs folder just explains how to use HTML5 boilerplate. You can delete it if you want. I’m going to delete mine.
Create .eleventy.js config file
Create a new file in the root folder called .eleventy.js. Add to it the following code.
const inspect = require("util").inspect;
module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("src", {
//debug: true,
filter: [
"404.html",
"**/*.css",
"**/*.js",
"**/*.json",
"!**/*.11ty.js",
"!**/*.11tydata.js",
]
});
// Copy img folder
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("src/img");
eleventyConfig.setServerPassthroughCopyBehavior("copy");
// tell 11ty which files to process and which files to copy while maintaining directory structure
// eleventyConfig.setTemplateFormats(["md","html","njk"]);
// Run me after the build ends
eleventyConfig.on('eleventy.after', async () => {
});
eleventyConfig.ignores.add("src/404.html");
// Values can be static:
eleventyConfig.addGlobalData("myStatic", "static");
// functions:
eleventyConfig.addGlobalData("myFunction", () => new Date());
eleventyConfig.addFilter("debug", (content) => `<pre>${inspect(content)}</pre>`);
// add support for blocks
eleventyConfig.addShortcode('renderlayoutblock', function(name) {
var blockContent = '';
if (this.page.layoutblock && this.page.layoutblock[name]) {
blockContent = this.page.layoutblock[name];
}
return blockContent;
});
eleventyConfig.addPairedShortcode('layoutblock', function(content, name) {
if (!this.page.layoutblock) {
this.page.layoutblock = {};
}
this.page.layoutblock[name] = content;
return '';
});
return {
dir: {
input: "src",
output: "www",
// ⚠️ These values are both relative to your input directory.
includes: "_includes",
layouts: "_layouts",
}
}
};
From top to bottom, the code above does the following
includes the util package to help with debugging
recursively looks for 404.html, *.css, *.json and *.js files (except for *.11ty.js and *.11tydata.js files) and copies them to the output (build) folder while maintaining folder structure. This allows you to have global JS and CSS files in root web folder, e.g. /js/main.js and /css/main.css, in addition to local, page-specific JS and CSS files, e.g. /company/index.html, /company/index.js, /company/index.css.
copies all files from /src/img to the output (build) folder
Using setServerPassthroughCopyBehavior, tells 11ty to pass-through copy files both when running a single build (npx @11ty/eleventy) and when building files during development using the --serve flag (npx @11ty/eleventy --serve)
tells 11ty to ignore the 404.html file. That file does not need to be built. If it gets built, it will be at /404/index.html, which is not what we want.
adds code to show debug information nicely in a web page
adds support for template blocks that works with 11ty’s template inheritance system (see note below)
specifies the input (source) folder as src, output (build) folder as www, the layouts folder as _layouts and the includes folder as _includes.
Include files are reusable code snippets like components, e.g. header, footer, etc.
Layout files are files that determine a page’s layout. Layout files can wrap other layout files.
Note: Both Nunjucks and 11ty have their own template inheritance mechanism. With Nunjucks, you inherit a parent template using {% extends "parent.njk" %}. With 11ty, you inherit a parent template in the front matter, e.g. --- layout: parent.njk --- Nunjucks actually supports template “block”s natively, but it doesn’t support front matter. Since there are benefits to having front-matter support, this post will use 11ty’s template inheritance mechanism. In doing so, Nunjuck’s native “block” support doesn’t work as expected. As a workaround, I have added shortcodes in the .eleventy.js config code above to produce the same effect of Nunjuck’s native “block”s. As you’ll see later, we’ll use the shortcodes {% renderlayoutblock %} and {% layoutblock %} instead of the Nunjucks {% block %}.
Re-run Eleventy when you save
To build the pages in the src folder, we can run the following command.
npx @11ty/eleventy
However, during development, it’s handy to have 11ty build any source file changes automatically. We do that using the following command.
npx @11ty/eleventy --serve
This runs a local web server that auto-reloads the browser when you save modified file.
An output (build) folder (in this case, www) will be created containing the built and copied files.
We can browse to http://localhost:8080/ and see the home page.
Create a default layout
At this point, we have our boilerplate home page (index.html) file.
Let’s create a header, footer, and sidebar containing nav links, and a main content area, like most websites have.
<header>
<p class="logo">ABC Company</p>
</header>
<div class="content-wrapper">
<nav>
<ul>
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>
<main>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Tempore, velit provident sed cum repellendus repudiandae ut mollitia animi. Voluptates expedita corporis pariatur sed quam. Ducimus fugiat quos eum aut eaque?</p>
</main>
</div>
<footer>
Copyright 2022
</footer>
I’ll also add some basic CSS to main.css to style the page.
Let’s create a layout from this index.html page and create “include” files containing code snippets that will be included on all pages.
Copy index.html to src/_layouts/default.njk (this will be a Nunjucks template)
In src/_layouts/default.njk
Prefix all relative paths with “/”, e.g.
css/normalize.css becomes /css/normalize.css
js/main.js becomes /js/main.js
Copy the <head> code block to src/_includes/head.html
Copy the <header> code block to src/_includes/header.html
Copy the <nav> code block to src/_includes/nav.html
Copy the <footer> code block to src/_includes/footer.html
Copy all of the <script> tags to src/_includes/scripts.html
Replace the <head> code block with {% include "head.html" %} to include the head code
Replace the <header> code block with {% include "header.html" %} to include the header code
Replace the <nav> code block with {% include "nav.html" %} to include the nav code
Replace the <footer> code block with {% include "footer.html" %} to include the footer code
Replace the <script> code with {% include "script.html" %} to include the scripts
Replace the lorem ipsum text with {{ content | safe }}. This content variable will be replaced with content from pages that use this template, like the home page.
This is how the files should look.
The contents of default.njk should look like this.
<!doctype html>
<html class="no-js" lang="">
{% include "head.html" %}
<body>
{% include "header.html" %}
<div class="content-wrapper">
{% include "nav.html" %}
<main>
{{ content | safe }}
</main>
</div>
{% include "footer.html" %}
{% include "scripts.html" %}
</body>
</html>
Replace the contents of index.html with the following.
---
layout: default.njk
---
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur, adipisicing elit. Facilis, voluptates distinctio fuga culpa praesentium quis repellat, mollitia vel repudiandae suscipit officiis tempora atque ratione quidem quo facere reiciendis, iste sit!</p>
The first section between the triple dashes is the front matter in YAML format. Here, we tell 11ty to use the default.njk layout for this page.
The content after the front matter will go where the content variable {{ content | safe }} is in the layout.
If we look at the home page in a browser, we’ll see that it looks exactly the same as before, except we’ve templatized the home page using a layout and many “include” files.
Add template blocks
Template blocks are handy because they let you add content to a parent template from a child template. For example, our base template (default.njk) may contain global content that applies to all pages, e.g. loading main.css, main.js, etc. A child template for a specific page, e.g. /index.njk or /about/index.njk, can use blocks to add local resources like local CSS and JS files specific to those pages.
First, let’s update our default.njk layout to use blocks using custom shortcodes explained above as follows:
Previously, we had a single head section (head.html) in the _includes folder. It’s better to split this up so that individual pages can have page-specific meta tags, styles, and scripts that need to go in the head. Replace head.html with meta.html and styles.html.
Note in the code above how there is a prependStyles and appendStyles block. This allows a child template to add stylesheets before and after the global styles that are included in styles.html. The same applies to the meta and scripts blocks.
Now, update index.html as follows and change the extension from .html to .njk so 11ty can process the blocks.
---
title: Home
layout: default.njk
---
{# add any meta tags that you want to come BEFORE other meta tags #}
{% layoutblock 'prependMeta' %}
{# <meta name="a" content="b"> #}
{% endlayoutblock %}
{# add any meta tags that you want to come AFTER other meta tags #}
{% layoutblock 'appendMeta' %}
{# <meta name="c" content="d"> #}
{% endlayoutblock %}
{# add any stylesheets that need to come BEFORE other stylesheets #}
{% layoutblock 'prependStyles' %}
{# <link rel="stylesheet" href="/index.css"> #}
{% endlayoutblock %}
{# add any stylesheets that need to come AFTER other stylesheets #}
{% layoutblock 'appendStyles' %}
{# <link rel="stylesheet" href="/index.css"> #}
{% endlayoutblock %}
{# add any scripts that need to go in the head #}
{% layoutblock 'scriptsInHead' %}
{# <script src="/js/x.js"></script> #}
{% endlayoutblock %}
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur, adipisicing elit. Facilis, voluptates distinctio fuga culpa praesentium quis repellat, mollitia vel repudiandae suscipit officiis tempora atque ratione quidem quo facere reiciendis, iste sit!</p>
{# add any scripts that need to go BEFORE other scripts before the closing </body> tag #}
{% layoutblock 'prependScripts' %}
{# <script src="/js/x.js"></script> #}
{% endlayoutblock %}
{# add any scripts that need to go AFTER other scripts before the closing </body> tag #}
{% layoutblock 'appendScripts' %}
{# <script src="/js/x.js"></script> #}
{% endlayoutblock %}
In the code above, I added some meta, link, and script tags. They’re commented out using {% ... %} since they are just to demonstrate usage.
Create another page
Let’s create an About page. Create a file at /about/index.html. The content of the file can be
---
layout: default.njk
Title: About
---
<h1>{{ title }} </h1>
<p>This is the about page.</p>
In this case, we added a front matter variable called title and output it using curly bracket notation. 11ty is processing these files as Liquid files using the Liquid templating engine.
You can also rename about.html to about.njk to use the Nunjucks templating engine. 11ty will process the file accordingly.
11ty supports many templating languages including HTML, Markdown, JavaScript, Nunjucks, Liquid, Handlebars, Moustache, EJS (Embedded JavaScript), HAML, Pug, and custom. I prefer Nunjucks.
Add files for git to ignore
There are some files/folders we don’t want git to track. The HTML5 boilerplate already includes a .gitignore file. Edit it and add “www” to the list. We don’t want to commit the built files to git. Files will be built during deployment. In the .eleventy.js config file, you can also make your build folder “dist” instead of “www”, if you prefer. “dist” stands for “distributable”. Some other common folder names are “public” and “build”,
# Include your project-specific ignores in this file
# Read about how to use .gitignore: https://help.github.com/articles/ignoring-files
# Useful .gitignore templates: https://github.com/github/gitignore
node_modules
dist
.cache
www
Draft mode
If you are working on a page that is not ready for production, you can tell 11ty not to build it. Simply add permalink: false in the front matter.
11ty supports template inheritance so that children templates or layouts can inherit their parent templates or layouts. For example, we can create a new layout called sublayout.njk. We indicate that it inherits from another layout (in this case, default.njk) by adding layout: default.njk to the front matter.
---
layout: default.njk
variable14: value14
---
<div class="foo">
<p>This content is wrapped in "div" tag with class="foo".</p>
{{ content | safe }}
</div>
We can then create a new page template that uses this child layout by adding layout: sublayout.njk in the front matter.
---
layout: sublayout.njk
title: Test nested layout
---
<h2>{{ title }}</h2>
<p>lorem ipsum...</p>
Data
A template in 11ty has access to data from multiple sources. 11ty merges all data sources. Data with the same keys are overwritten based on priority.
.eleventy.js lowest prio (7): data via addGlobalData method
_data/
site.json lower prio (6): global data file
_layouts/layouts/
default.njk high prio (3): data in layout front matter
blog/
blog.json low prio (5b): data in parent dir data file
posts/
posts.json low prio (5a): data in directory data file
article.njk higher prio (2): data in template front matter
article.json medium prio (4): data in template data file
article.11tydata.js highest prio (1): eleventyComputed in template js
Global data files
Global data is accessible to all templates. You can have global data in /src/_data. The _data folder is a special 11ty global data folder. This folder may contain files like data.json and data.js. Here’s an example data.json file.
In your base/default layout, e.g. default.njk, you can add data to the front matter. This data can then be used by all page templates that inherit from that layout. Here’s an example.
You can have data that is accessible to only specific pages. For example, if you have a page template at /foo/bar/index.njk, then you can have sibling data files at /foo/bar/colors.json or /foo/bar/bar.11tydata.js or /foo/bar/bar.11ty.js. The json data returned from those data files would then only be accessible to /foo/bar/bar.njk.
IMPORTANT: To access local json and data.js data, the files must have the name of their folder, e.g.
/foo/bar/bar.json
/foo/bar/bar11tydata.js
/foo/bar/bar.njk
If your template file is index.njk, it won’t be able to access the data.
Local data in front matter of page template
If you have a page template at /foo/bar/index.njk, you can add data to its front matter. This data would only be accessible to that page template and no other.
Dump and view all global and local data
Inevitably, you will be working on a page that doesn’t output the data you expect. You can enable debug mode, but the debug information may be lost or truncated in your console output. Earlier in this post, we added a filter to .eleventy.js that uses the util node package for debugging. Now, we can use that filter to dump all global and local data to a page in the browser for easy viewing. To do that, add the following code to any page template.
Note: the front matter format has to be JS, not YAML. Also, you must specify the layout in the front matter. Some people use Nunjucks’ {% extends %} but that won’t work for dumping variables.
---js
{
layout: "default.njk",
variable1: "value1",
eleventyComputed: {
datum(data) {
return data;
}
}
}
---
<h2>Dump of all data</h2>
<pre><code>{{ datum | debug }}</code></pre>
When you view the page in a browser, you’ll see a nice JSON dump of all data like this.
Inevitably, you will come across a situation where you want to have a slightly different version of an HTML snippet. For example, you can have a snippet of HTML for a hero section and you want to have the option of showing different hero images. Instead of creating a bunch of include/partial files containing almost identical code, you can create components that accept parameters. These components behave like functions. In Nunjucks, they are called macros.
1. Create a component loader
First, we’ll create a Nunjucks’ macro that will simplify how we load other macros. I’ll put it at /includes/component.njk.
{%- macro component(name, params) -%}
{%- include name + ".njk" ignore missing -%}
{%- endmacro -%}
2. Create some components
For demonstration purposes, I’ll create two simple components. The first one will show a button with a customizable label. I put it at /includes/button.njk.
The second one just shows a message in a box. If a certain parameter is present, then an additional second message will be shown. I put this at /includes/note.njk.
<div style="background-color: #efefef;">
<p>This is a message</p>
{% if params.show2ndMsg %}
<p>This second message only shows if the show2ndMsg variable is true</p>
{% endif %}
</div>
3. Call the components
Now, in a page template where we want to show the component, we just need to call the component loader (component.njk) and the components themselves, optionally passing in some parameters.
To avoid errors, do not initialize the new repository with README, license, or gitignore files. You can add these files after your project has been pushed to GitHub.
Initialize the local directory as a git repo. Run git init -b main in our project folder. This will create a hidden .git folder.
Add the files in your new local repository. This stages them for the first commit.
git add .
Commit the files that you’ve staged in your local repository.
git commit -m "First commit"
At the top of your repository on GitHub.com’s Quick Setup page, click to copy the remote repository URL.
Now, let’s host our site for free on Netlify. Create a Netlify account and add a new site by importing an existing project.
Connect Netlify to GitHub and choose a repo. If you don’t see your repo, configure Netlify to be able to access some or all repos in your GitHub account.
Netlify will analyze your site and suggest default build settings. As you can see below, Netlify correctly detected that my site was built using 11ty so it populated the “Build command” and “Publish directory” using the default Eleventy values.
Click “Deploy site’ and wait a minute or two for your site to be deployed. Netlify will clone the repo, install any dependencies as listed in the package-lock.json file, run the Eleventy build command, and host the built files. You will then see how long it took to build the entire site and be provided a free Netlify URL where you can view the live site. In this case, the entire build took 37s.
The free Netlify URL generated is https://enchanting-malabi-4c2a4e.netlify.app/
Going to that URL, we see the same site as we saw on our local dev machine.
Let’s change that subdomain to someone simpler and more relevant. In Netlify, go to Settings > General > Site Details and change it. I’ll change mine to “my11tywebsite”. Now, I can visit my website at https://my11tywebsite.netlify.app/.
Add a Custom Domain
To add a custom domain that you’ve registered at a domain registrar other than Netlify, e.g. GoDaddy, you’ll need to delegate the domain to Netlify and update the nameservers to point to Netlify’s nameservers.
First, click on “Domains” > “Add or register domain”.
Enter your custom domain and click “Verify”.
You will then see Netlify’s nameservers. You’ll need to go to your domain’s registrar and update the nameservers to these servers.
Once you’ve done that, you need to associate the domain with a particular site. Go to Site Settings > Domain Management > Domains and click Add Custom Domain. Enter the domain you just delegated to Netlify and click Verify.
Add SSL/TLS Certificate
You can now add SSL/TLS to your site so you can access it at the HTTPS protocol. Go to Site Settings > Domain Management > Domains and click HTTPS. Then click Provision certificate.
Environment Variables
Environment variables are useful for storing settings and secret keys for different environments, e.g. development, staging, and production. First, install the dotenv node package.
npm install dotenv
Then, create a .env file in the root of your project (as a sibling of package.json and .gitignore) and add some variables to it.
# DO NOT COMMIT THIS FILE
# ADD .env TO .gitignore
ENVIRONMENT=development
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_USER=admin
DB_PASSWORD=password
Since I’m on my development machine, I set the ENVIRONMENT variable to “development”.
Since the .env file contains passwords and secret keys, and it only applies to a specific environment, don’t commit it. Add it to your .gitignore file, e.g.
In order to access the environment variables in 11ty page templates, we need to load them as a global variable in our global JS file. Edit _data/site.js as follows. Here
Since the file is called site.js, the global variables will be accessible under the “site” object, e.g. site.environment, site.db_host, etc. If you dump all data to a page, as explained above using the eleventyComputed front matter, you should see these environment variables. Here’s an example page template demonstrating how to use environment variables in a page template.
On your local development machine, you’ll see this.
Since our production website is running on Netlify, we can add production environment variables in Netlify. Under Site settings > Environment variables, we can add environment variables.
And as expected, the page in production shows different (production) values.
Staging Site
At this point, we have two environments:
development (localhost:8080)
production (Netlify domain: https://my11tywebsite.netlify.app)
When working with a larger team, you’ll often need to show people a preview of some changes for their review. This is normally done on a staging site. To create one, we’ll create a branch in Github called “staging” and tell Netlify to deploy it to staging–my11tywebsite.netlify.app. In Github, create a branch as shown below.
Now, we should see 2 branches and be able to switch between the two. At this point, both branches are in sync with each other and contain the same files.
In Netlify, go to Site > Settings > Build & Deploy > Continuous Deployment > Branches and add the staging branch.
To trigger a build and deployment on staging, let’s make a simple change to the readme file and commit it. Netlify will detect the commit to the staging branch in Github, build the site from that branch, and deploy it to https://staging–my11tywebsite.netlify.app/.
Now, we don’t want the public to be able to view the staging site, so let’s password-protect it. Go to Site Settings > Access Control > Visitor Access and set a global password. This is a paid feature.
Publish changes from staging to production
Once the staged changes are reviewed and approved, we can publish them by merging the changes from the staging branch to the production branch. You’ll see in Github a notice that the staging branch is ahead of the main branch by 1 commit.
You can use git on the command line or a git client, e.g. Github Desktop, to perform the merge. You can also do it in Github. Click the green Compare & pull request button. This will allow you to open a pull request with the repo owner. The repo owner can then accept the pull request to merge in the changes.
In Github Desktop, switch to the main branch and then choose the staging branch to merge into main.
Click the Create a merge commit button. You’ll then need to push the commit to the local main branch to the remote main branch on Github. In Github Desktop, you can do that by clicking the Push origin button.
Now, both branches are in sync and Netlify will trigger a build and deploy of the changes from the main branch.
Reverting the website to a previous version
Netlify uses atomic deploys to deploy versions of a website to its many nodes in its CDN. Unlike deploying files one by one, atomic deploys ensure a globally consistent version of the website is deployed. You can think of it as zipping up the whole site, uploading the zip file, then unzipping the file to deploy the site. If the unzip process fails, then entire deployment fails. Users will not see a partially-deployed (and broken) website. One of the benefits of this is the ability to instantly roll back a mistake directly in Netlify because Netlify keeps a history of deployments. Rather than reverting a change in git and committing it to fix the mistake, you can simply click on a previous deployment and then click the “Publish Deploy” button. You can then take your time to fix your code in git. Learn more.
Preview past deployments
If you’d like to see how a previous version of your website looked, you can preview them rather than roll back to them. Each deployment is atomic and Netlify provides a publicly accessible live version of each deployment by prefixing a unique hash to the website domain. For example, I made two simple changes to the home page and committed and deployed each change separately.
The most recent deployment, which is labeled “Published” and has commit message “Commit DEF”, is accessible at the production URL: https://my11tywebsite.netlify.app/.
You’ll often find yourself in need of pulling data from an API endpoint that returns JSON data and displaying that data in a page. This can easily be done using the eleventy-fetch plugin. Let’s test this out. First, install the eleventy-fetch plugin.
npm install @11ty/eleventy-fetch
We’ll need a URL where the JSON data is located. For testing purposes, I created a JSON file at the root of my project in GitHub so I can access it at
Now, let’s add an 11tydata.js file to fetch this data with the following code.
const EleventyFetch = require("@11ty/eleventy-fetch");
module.exports = async function() {
try {
let url = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/javanigus/eleventy-basic-site/main/colors.json';
/* This returns a promise */
return EleventyFetch(url, {
duration: "1m",
type: "json"
});
} catch(e) {
return {
// my failure fallback data
}
}
};
I set a cache duration of 1 minute.To display the data, I created a simple .njk template with the following content:
---
title: "Test Fetching JSON From Remote URL with Caching",
layout: "default.njk",
---
<h1>{{title}}</h1>
<ul>
{% for color in colors %}
<li>ID: {{color.id}} - Color: {{color.color}}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
If you build the site locally, you will see a .cache folder created with two files.
The eleventy-fetch-07e8b9a55a957158da72b706594705.json file contains the JSON data as shown below.
The eleventy-fetch-07e8b9a55a957158da72b706594705 file contains information about the filename of the data file and when it was cached.
Since the cache duration was set to one minute, if you rebuild the site within one minute, the eleventy-fetch plugin will not fetch the remote data but rather use the cached data. However, if you rebuild the site after one minute, the eleventy-cache plugin will fetch the remote data and update the cache and the web page.
The above works fine locally. However, remotely, Netlify doesn’t cache data by default. As a result, Netlify will always fetch the remote data. In order to get the same behavior as on Netlify, we need to persist the .cache folder. This can be done by installing the netlify-plugin-cache plugin and creating some directives in a .toml configuration file. First, install the plugin:
npm install netlify-plugin-cache
Also, verify that .cache is listed in your .gitignoore file like this.
Do not ever commit the .cache folder to version control. Make sure .cache is listed in your .gitignore file.
Commit these files to GitHub so they can trigger a Netlify build. Once Netlify is done building the page, it will save the cached files remotely. This way, you can cut down on API requests and build pages faster. You can adjust the cache duration time in the 11data.js file. Learn more about 11ty fetch.
Redirects
You can add redirects in two ways: in a _redirects file and in a .toml file. We’ll add redirects to a _redirects file. First, create a file called _redirects in the src folder with the following contents
# Redirects from what the browser requests to what we serve
# 301: page has permanently moved to a new location
# 302: page has temporarily moved to a new location
/home / 301
/foo /about 302
This file has to be in the src folder because it needs to end up in the build output (www) folder. To have 11ty copy the _redirects file to the output folder, add it to the eleventy.js config file.
You can’t test redirects locally during development. They only work in Netlify.
Commit your _redirects and eleventy.js files and push them to Github. Netlify will trigger a build and in the deploy summary, you’ll see how many redirects were processed, e.g.
By default, git handles binary files (images, PDFs, etc) differently than text files. With text files, only the text changes are saved with each commit. With binary files, the entire file is saved with each commit. As a result, your git repo can quickly become huge. Since Netlify clones your Github repo with every build, this not only causes build times to take longer, it also will increase your Netlify bill. You can use Git LFS and Netlify Large Media, but if you don’t need to version binary files, why bother. You might as well store binary files on Amazon S3/CloudFront which is dirt cheap. If you don’t like the cryptic AWS CloudFront-provided domain, you can add your own domain, e.g. resources.yourwebsite.com. In your website code, you can reference images, for example, using the CloudFront-hosted URL.
Optimizing Images
As mentioned above, hosting binary files that don’t need to be versioned can be done in AWS S3/CloudFront. But, AWS can’t optimize images automatically. Therefore, you should using a dedication image optimization service like ImageKit or Cloudinary. These services can clone your images from your origin, e.g. CloudFront, and host them on their servers while also optimizing them.
Bundling CSS and JS
When building a website, you will likely reference many CSS and JS files. This helps modularize these dependencies, but it can result in a slower-loading website, as the number of network requests increases. One solution is to use a bundler like WebPack, rollup, Parcel, Vite, etc. Parcel is probably the easiest to set up, but integrating Parcel into 11ty isn’t simple.
11ty has released an official bundler plugin that simplifies bundling CSS. Integration and usage is super simple.
When you update a CSS or JS file and then reload a page, you often won’t see the updates because your browser has cached the CSS or JS files. This is annoying, and you often have to hard reload or open in incognito mode. To fix this, a common practice is to add a URL parameter to CSS and JS URLs that changes depending on whether the file was modified, e.g. last modified timestamp or md5 content hash.
Making a page interactive is usually done using JavaScript. You can write vanilla JS, use jQuery, React, etc. There are many JavaScript frameworks available. But, Svelte is a relatively new framework that is better in many ways, including being easy to learn. For example, many websites include a page with lots of content and some controls to filter such content. Svelte makes it very easy to add this type of functionality.
Integrating a Svelte app into an Eleventy site can be done using Eleventy Plugin Embed Svelte. However, at the time of this writing, the plugin did not work on Windows. As a workaround, you can build the Svelte app separately, copy the compiled output and paste it into your template in Eleventy. Learn more.
Workflow
With the setup above, your workflow could be like this:
Upload binary files (images, pdfs, etc), if any, to AWS S3/CloudFront. S3 supports uploading multiple files and maintains folder structure.
Edit HTML, CSS, JS locally
If there are images, reference the ImageKit image CDN URL
If there are links to other binary files, e.g. pdfs, link to the AWS CloudFront URL. For PDFs, optimize them for web in Adobe Acrobat (Tools > Optimize).
Test at http://localhost:8080
Commit to staging branch and push to GitHub
Preview changes at staging.mywebsite.com on Netlify (this site should be password protected)
Share staging URL with others for review and approval
When ready to publish, merge changes from staging branch to master branch, commit, and push to Github
Jamstack is the new standard architecture for the web. Using Git workflows and modern build tools, pre-rendered content is served to a CDN and made dynamic through APIs and serverless functions. Technologies in the stack include JavaScript frameworks, Static Site Generators, Headless CMSs, and CDNs.
Traditional Web (left) vs Jamstack (right)
Jamstack benefits
Jamstack offers many benefits over traditional web stack.
Security Published text files are HTML, CSS and JavaScript only. No server-side scripts like PHP
Scalability As website traffic grows, scaling is much easier when your website amounts to a bunch of static HTML files that can be served from a CDN.
Performance Static HTML files don’t require server-side processing. Files can be served from a CDN.
Maintainability It’s much easier to maintain a simple server that hosts static files rather than application and database servers. The heavy lifting of building the static files is done before deployment resulting in stable production files.
Portability Since Jamstack sites are pre-generated, the production files are simple static files which can be hosted anywhere on any simple host.
Developer experience Jamstack sites are built on widely available tools and conventions making it easier for developers to learn and develop.
Jamstack is a term that was coined by two developers who pioneered the architecture while working at Netlify. This post will explain how to set up a web development, build and release system using the following components
Hugo (static site generator)
GitHub (version control)
Netlify (CI/CD + serverless web hosting)
Netlify CMS (content management system)
imageKit.io (image optimization and CDN)
Web development workflow
Let’s say you have a website at example.com. This workflow will depend on having a GitHub repo with 2 branches (main and develop) and 2 sites hosted on Netlify, one for production (www.example.com) and one for staging (staging.example.com). The staging site will have site-wide password protection using an option in Netlify.
The workflow using this setup is very common:
Edit web page files locally, e.g. using VisualStudio Code
Commit and push changes to develop branch in private GitHub repo
Any commit to the develop branch in GitHub auto-triggers a build to generate and deploy static files to a staging site in Netlify (staging.example.com)
Preview changes in a password-protected, external staging URL
Merge and push changes from develop branch to main branch. This will auto-trigger a build to generate and deploy static files to a production site in Netlify
View published changes in production (www.example.com)
Note
If you need to make an edit, you can make it directly in GitHub as well.
If you’d like to provide a CMS for your pages (usually for non-technical people), you can use Netlify CMS.
Create GitHub repository and branches
Let’s first create a GitHub repo. We’ll call it example.com and make it private since we don’t want competitors seeing our potentially confidential information. Within this repo, we’ll have 2 branches.
main (for www.example.com / production)
develop (for staging.example.com / development)
GitHub’s default branch is called main so we’ll use that name for the production branch.
Extract the executable to C:\Hugo\bin. You will end up with 3 files like this.
Add the executable to the PATH
open Windows PowerShell
change to the C:\Hugo\bin folder
append C:\Hugo\bin to the existing PATH by entering $Env:PATH += ";C:\Hugo\bin"
Verify the update by outputting the PATH value using the command Write-Output $Env:PATH
Verify the executable by running the command hugo help. You should see output like below.
Create a new site
Now that Hugo is installed, we can use it to create a new site. Run the following commands.
cd C:\Hugo\Sites
hugo new site example.com
You should then see output indicating a new site was created.
In the Hugo/Sites folder, you should see files and folders as shown below.
Here’s what the folders are for.
├── archetypes (templates for different content types)
├── config.toml (top level configuration file)
├── content (this is where content goes in HTML or markdown format)
├── data (for local and remote dynamic content, e.g. JSON data)
├── layouts (layouts for pages (list pages, home page) and partials, etc)
├── static (images, CSS, JavaScript, etc)
└── themes (for themes)
Install a theme
Now, you can browse themes, install one and make customizations to it. In my case, I will create a theme from scratch.
Create a new theme
Run the command hugo new theme exampleTheme to create a theme called “exampleTheme”.
C:\Hugo\Sites\example.com> hugo new theme exampleTheme
Creating theme at C:\Hugo\Sites\example.com\themes\exampleTheme
C:\Hugo\Sites\example.com>
This will create an exampleTheme subfolder in the themes folder. The folder structure should look like this:
themes/exampleTheme/layouts/index.html this is the home page layout
themes/exampleTheme/layouts/single.html this is the layout for a single page type, e.g. blog post
themes/exampleTheme/layouts/list.html this is the layout for a list of page types, e.g. blog posts
When you start development, you want to run hugo server to have Hugo detect file changes and reload your local browser for you. In the output below, we see that the local server is at http://localhost:1313. If I go to that URL, I will see a blank screen since I haven’t created any web pages yet.
Notice also in the output that there are some warnings because we’re missing some files. They will be fixed.
Edit config file
I’m using VisualStudio Code to edit files. First, I’ll update the config.toml file by changing the base URL and title. In order to use the new theme we created, we need to reference it in the config file by adding theme = 'exampleTheme' to it.
Most websites have a main menu for navigating from one page to another. The menu links are common to all pages. Let’s define them in the config file by adding the following to it.
If you open the theme’s layouts folder, you’ll see some default layouts and some partials layouts. The base layout (baseof.html) is the parent-most layout. As you can see in the screenshot below, the base layout has
some partials
a main block
The list (list.html) and single (single.html) layouts will use the base (baseof.html) layout. The contents of the list and single layouts will go in the main block of the base layout.
The base layout includes partials for the
head section (head.html)
header section (header.html)
footer section (footer.html)
of every page. Partials are like include files. They are small, context-aware components that can be used economically to keep your templating DRY. These are standard sections of most websites which is why they’ve been auto-generated. If you don’t want to use a particular section, you can remove it from the base layout or leave it as is as those partial files are empty by default.
Now, let’s fill out the layouts and partials.
head.html partial
Open example.com/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/partials/head.html in a text editor. This will be the place for metadata like the document title, character set, styles, scripts, and other meta information. Paste the following
There are two CSS files. We can create an empty style.css file and put it at example.com/themes/exampleTheme/static/css.
For the page title, we will show the site title (taken from config.toml) if we are on the home page, otherwise, we’ll show the site title followed by the page title of the page we’re on.
header.html partial
Normally in a website’s header you will find navigation links. Open example.com/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/partials/header.html
and paste the following
Note how the navigation link names and URLs are coming from the config.toml file we updated earlier. The keyword range causes the template to loop over the items in .Site.Menus.main array. Alternatively, you could just hardcode the nav links directly in the header.html file.
footer.html partial
For the footer, let’s just add a basic copyright disclaimer.
The current year will be displayed automatically. If you are wondering why “2006”, you can find out more about it here.
script.html partial
Most websites have some JavaScript. The Hugo auto-generated partial files didn’t include a script partial for JavaScript that should be loaded on all pages. Let’s create one at example.com/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/partials/script.html and paste the following code. Later on, we can add other scripts like jQuery to it.
Like style.css, we’ll also need to add a script.js file and put it at example.com/themes/exampleTheme/static/js.
metadata.html partial
Let’s create one more partial to display metadata about each post, e.g. date and tags. Each blog post will have front matter containing key-value pairs specific to each post, e.g.
---
author: "John Doe"
title: "My First Post"
date: "2006-02-01"
tags: ["foo", "bar"]
---
The keys can be referenced as variables in our new partial. Create a new file example.com/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/partials/metadata.html and paste the following code.
As mentioned earlier, the base layout was auto-generated by Hugo. But, since we created a script.html partial for JavaScript files and code that needs to load on all pages, let’s add that partial to the base layout. Open example.com/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/_default/baseof.html and add script.html after footer.html so that JavaScript does not block page rendering.
This layout will be used to display a list of blog posts. As explained earlier, the content in this file will define the main block of the baseof.html layout. We’ll create a simple layout for listing blog posts. Open example.com/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/_default/list.html and paste the following code.
Note how this layout contains a reference to {{ define "main" }} because we are defining the main block of the base layout. We’re referencing .Summary because we only want to show a summary of each blog post.
single.html layout
This layout will be used to display a single page or blog post. As explained earlier, the content in this file will define the main block of the baseof.html layout. We’ll create a simple single-post layout. Open example/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/_default/single.html and copy and paste the code below.
Notice how we are including the metadata.html partial in this layout. Unlike in the list partial, which references the Summary variable, this single partial references the Content variable because we want to show the entire blog post content.
Home page layout
The home page layout is at example.com/themes/exampleTheme/layouts/index.html. Since we’re loading Bootstrap CSS, we can use the Jumbotron component to render a hero section. Paste the following.
Hugo auto-generated an empty 404.html layout in our theme. Since Hugo comes with a default 404, we can delete this one or customize it, if we want.
Write your first blog post
In a terminal, run this command hugo new posts/my-first-post.md.
When you do that, Hugo creates a file with some default front matter.
The template for creating new page types is in the archetypes folder. By default, there’s only one called default.md. It’s a markdown file.
Open the newly created content file at example.com/content/posts/my-first-post.md and add some tags to the front matter followed by some content in either Markdown or HTML. Hugo automatically takes the first 70 words of your content as its summary and stores it into the .Summary variable. Instead, you can manually define where the summary ends with a <!--more--> divider. Alternatively, you can add a summary to the front matter if you don’t want your summary to be the beginning of your post.
---
title: "My First Post"
date: 2020-01-26T23:11:13Z
draft: true
tags: ["foo", "bar"]
---
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Pellentesque eu tincidunt tortor aliquam nulla facilisi cras fermentum odio. A erat nam at lectus urna duis.
Sed velit dignissim sodales ut eu sem. Lectus urna duis convallis convallis
tellus. Diam sit amet nisl suscipit adipiscing bibendum est. Sed felis eget
velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur. Vulputate dignissim suspendisse in est ante in nibh mauris cursus. Morbi quis commodo odio aenean. Mollis nunc sed id semper risus in hendrerit gravida rutrum.
<!--more-->
Ac ut consequat semper viverra nam. Hac habitasse platea dictumst vestibulum
rhoncus. Amet porttitor eget dolor morbi non. Justo eget magna fermentum
iaculis eu non. Id eu nisl nunc mi ipsum faucibus vitae aliquet nec. Aliquam
id diam maecenas ultricies. Non sodales neque sodales ut etiam. Amet massa
vitae tortor condimentum lacinia quis. Erat imperdiet sed euismod nisi porta.
Nisl suscipit adipiscing bibendum est ultricies integer quis auctor. Viverra
suspendisse potenti nullam ac. Tincidunt id aliquet risus feugiat in. Varius
quam quisque id diam vel. Egestas erat imperdiet sed euismod nisi. celerisque felis imperdiet proin fermentum leo vel orci porta non. Ut faucibus pulvinar elementum integer. Fermentum odio eu feugiat pretium nibh ipsum consequat nisl.
Viewing the site
Open a terminal and run the following from the root folder of your site
hugo server -D
The -D flag means to include content marked as draft. Alternative, you can change draft: true to draft: false in the front matter. When I ran that command, I got an error in the terminal.
Since I knew Hugo would serve the site at http://localhost:1313, I went there to see what Hugo would show in this case. Fortunately, Hugo also shows a descriptive error in the browser as well.
Apparently, I added a reference to the script.html partial but I forgot to create the partial. After creating the partial, I reran hugo server -D and I get the following output showing no errors.
The output says that the web server is at http://localhost:1313. Navigating there shows the site as shown below.
This is the home pageThis is the list view (there’s only one post right now)This is the single blog post detail view
Let’s say you want to build a simple, static website with the following requirements.
You want to keep track of changes to each file using version control.
You don’t want to spend a lot of money.
You want a simple setup, intuitive interface, and automatic publishing of changes.
You want SSL encryption with a certificate that automatically renews.
You want your own custom domain.
You don’t want to manage servers and you want to focus on your content.
You can accomplish this in many ways. But, I think the easiest way is to use GitHub and Netlify.
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git, plus its own features.
Netlify
Netlify is a San Francisco-based cloud computing company that offers hosting and serverless backend services for web applications and static websites.
This post will show you how easy it is to set up a simple website using GitHub and Netlify.
1. Create a free GitHub and Netlify account
This step is self-explanatory. If you create a GitHub account first, you can then log in to Netlify using your GitHub account, which saves time.
2. Create a repository in GitHub
I created a private repository (repo) called “documentation” to create a hypothetical website containing product documentation. When I created the repo, I opted to automatically create a README.md file to explain what the repo is about. At this point, there’s only one file in the repo.
3. Create a new project in Netlify
When you create a new project, you have a few options. In this case, we’ll choose “Import from Git”,
4. Choose Git provider
Since we’re using GitHub, choose GitHub.
5. Connect Netlify to GitHub
In order to auto-publish from GitHub to Netlify, you need to connect the two.
6. Choose repositories
You may choose to connect Netlify to all of your GitHub repositories or just some. In this example, I just want Netlify connected to the one “documentation” repo I just created.
7. Choose a branch to deploy
In this example, I only have one default branch called “main” in the “documentation” repo. Since I just need to transfer static files in GitHub to Netlify, there is nothing to build.
8. Deploy site
Once you click the “Deploy Site” button, Netlify will take all existing files in your GitHub repo and host them. You can see the status of the deployment in the “Site overview” tab along with the default URL. Notice that in steps 2 and 3 of the screenshot below, you can set up a custom domain and secure your site automatically with a Let’s Encrypt certificate.
9. See the deployed site
If you go to the auto-generated URL, you’ll see a Page Not Found error. That’s because we only have a README.md file in the repo.
10. Create an index.html file
Let’s create a home page for our new website. In GitHub, create a new file with filename “index.html” and add some HTML to it.
Commit the new file. For simplicity, I will leave the default values and click “Commit new file”.
You will then see that you have two files in the repo.
11. View deployment status
When you committed the file in GitHub, that automatically triggered a deployment to Netlify. In Netlify, click the “Deploys” tab to check the status of the deployment. In the screenshot below, we see that the status is “Published”.
12. View the deployed change
Going to the auto-generated URL in Netlify, we see that our new home page has been published.
13. Handling Large Media (Images, PDFs, etc)
If you have large, non-text media such as images and PDFs, to avoid bloating your repo, you can use Git LFS. Clicking on the “Large Media” tab gives you more information about that. Personally, for images, I prefer to use ImageKit.io. Alternatives are Cloudinary and Uploadcare.
14. Analytics
You can install Google Analytics on your website and/or you can get analytics from Netlify for $9 per month. Clicking on the “Analytics” tab provides more information.
Redirects
If you need to create redirects, you can use a simple redirect file.
Or, you can create advanced redirects in the Netlify configuration file.
If you want a staging environment where certain people can preview changes before you push them to production, one way to do this is by
creating a “develop” branch in your GitHub repo
connecting Netflify to that branch
enabling site-wide password protection in Netlify (password protection is a paid feature) on the site sourced from that branch.
Though Netlify supports basic authentication, it is not the most secure method of protecting a site. Instead, you can use Netlify’s site-wide protection which uses JWT secret.
Get unique / remove duplicate lines in a list of text
Select a column of text
Find text in a single file and copy all matches to the clipboard
Add text to the beginning of each line of text
Copy differences (diff) between two files
Rename multiple filenames in multiple folders
The instructions below use Visual Studio Code unless stated otherwise.
Find and replace text in a single text file
Open the text file in Visual Studio Code
Click Edit > Find or Edit > Replace
Enter your search term and replace term
Use optional options like
case senstive match
match whole word
regular expression
preserve case
replace first match
replace all matches at once
find in selection
Find and replace text in multiple files
In Visual Studio Code, right click on a folder and click “Find in Folder…”
Enter your search term and replace term
Use optional options like
case senstive match
match whole word
regular expression
preserve case
In the search results, you will see a preview of the text change.
If you click on a preview in search results, you can can the a side-by-side view of the change in each file.
Sort a list of text
Select all the text to sort
Right click on the selection and click “Sort lines”
Get unique / remove duplicate lines in a list of text
Select the list of text
Click View > Command Paletter
Click one of the unique sort options
Select a column of text
Put the cursor at one corner of the column of text you want to select
On Windows, click and hold “Shift” + “Alt” keys and drag the cursor to the opposite corner of the column of text you want to select
You can then start typing to replace the text or copy the text to the clipboard
Find text in a single file and copy all matches to the clipboard
Open the text in Visual Studio Code
Click Edit > Find
Enter a search term
Click Selection > Select All Occurrences All matches will be highlighted. Notice the different highlight color in the two screenshots below.
Right click on the highlighted text and click “Copy”
You could then paste the copied text in a new file
Add text to the beginning of each line of text
Click Edit > Replace
Use the following regex search
Copy differences (diff) between two files
Let’s say you have two files and you want to get only the differences between the two. Visual Studio Code will show you a diff between two files as follows:
Open both files
Select both files in the OPEN EDITORS section
Right click and click “Compare Selected”
You will then see a nice diff between the two files.
But, you won’t be able to copy only the changed lines or export the diff. On Windows, you can use a tool called DiffMerge by SourceGear. If you open both files, you’ll see a similar view.
You can then click Export > File Diffs > Traditional > In Text > To Clipboard to copy the diff to your clipboard.
You can then paste the diff in a text editor like Visual Studio Code and extract only the text you are interested in.
Rename multiple filenames in multiple folders
Let’s say you have many files and you want to rename the filenames all at once. For this, I find it easy to use a tool like Rename Expert. For example, in the screenshot below, I did the following:
Added all files the filenames of which I want to rename
Under “Actions”, chose the actions I want done. In this case, I did 2 actions:
Replace (to replace the first character of each filename with an underscore)
Edit file extension (to change the file extension from php to jpg)
Previewed the changes and resolve any conflicts
Clicked the Apply button to run the batch renaming of files.
Whenever you make a change to a website, you need to deploy your changes to a production server. This can be as simple as uploading some files and as complex as having a multi-step process involving version control, building code, running custom scripts, checking links, image optimization, and then rsync-ing files to multiple production servers. To manage the build and deployment process, developers often use continuous integration (CI) and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CD). CI/CD bridges the gaps between development and operation activities and teams by enforcing automation in building, testing and deployment of applications.
I’ve used Travis CI and attempted to use CircleCI but both seemed more complicated than I would like them to be. I then came across Buddy which got a lot of good reviews and looked super simple to set up. For me personally, I just wanted a simple way to commit changes to this blog’s custom WordPress theme in GitHub and have the changes SFTP’d to the production server. Though you can do that using GitHub Actions, it looked like more work and didn’t come with useful reporting and notifications like what you get with Buddy. Below is how I set up Buddy to detect whenever I commit or push to GitHub and then SFTP the changes to a server.
1. Sign up for Buddy
Buddy requires that you sign up using a work email address or to log in using your GitHub account. I wasn’t using this for work so I just logged in using my existing GitHub account.
2. Create a project
Click the “Create a new project” button. Since I logged in using my GitHub account, Buddy instantly showed me my GitHub repos. Click on a repo for this project you are working on. In my case, I chose “my-blog”.
3. Add a new pipeline
Click to add a new pipeline. You will be asked for a number of things including:
Name – I just called the pipeline “Commit / Push to GitHub Then SFTP to abdullahyahya.com”
Trigger Mode – I chose “On push” because I want to trigger the pipeline whenever I commit or push to GitHub.
Branch or Tag That Triggers the Pipeline – I chose “Single branch” and “main” since, well, I only have one branch (main) and no tags.
Target Website URL – I entered my blog’s website URL
Trigger Condition – there are a few options here but I chose to have the pipeline be triggered only if there were changes in the repository since last execution which is probably what most people want.
Set currently deployed revision on the remotes – Since I already had commits in GitHub that were in sync what production, I chose the most recently commit revision to avoid unnecessarily deploying everything from scratch.
Other – there are other options but I just left them at their defaults
4. Add an action
On the next step, you need to choose an action that will take place in the pipeline (when there is a change committed / pushed to GitHub). Since I just want to SFTP the changes, I chose the SFTP action. Browse all Buddy actions.
5. Set up action
Now, you need to set up your chosen action. In this case, I need to set up my source and destination file paths and SFTP login credentials.
If you click the Action tab / button, you can name your action and temporarily disable the action, among other things.
Test your action by clicking the “Test action” link. In my case, Buddy connecting to the production server of SFTP, created a test directory, deleted the test directory, testing uploading a file, and deleted the test file.
When you are done, you will see your new pipeline listed along with any other pipelines you have. You can manually run the pipeline also.
7. Do a real test
To do a real test of my pipeline, I added a comment to a file directly in GitHub and committed it. Seconds later, I saw the commit message show up in Buddy. I then verified that the comment was actually added to the file on the production server.
8. Add more actions to the pipeline
If you click the Actions button / tab, you’ll see all actions in the pipeline. You can add more actions that run in certain situations. In this example, I added an action to send myself an email if the pipeline fails. You can also add actions that rsync files to a server, optimize images, perform link checking, run a custom shell script, and much more.
9. Done
So that’s it. Super easy. Intuitive. Fast. I like it!
I just came back from Istanbul and wanted to make a video using my new Insta360 ONE X2 360 degree camera. To make viewers feel like they’re joining me on the trip, I wanted to include video clips showing movement from one place to another. This was easy to do using Google Earth Pro on desktop. Here’s are some examples.
In the video below, there are 4 “places”
San Francisco (zoomed in)
San Francisco (zoomed out to space)
Istanbul (zoomed out to space)
Istanbul (zoomed in)
Here’s how to make the video.
Add “Places”
To add a place, you can search for the place using the Search field. Then, zoom in or out to your desired elevation. When you like the view of the place, click the “Add Placemark” button to add a yellow pin to the place. If you want the place label to appear in the map, check the checkbox beside the place name.
If you right click on a place under “My Places” and click on “Properties”, you can rename the place, change the camera elevation (range), etc.
Record a Tour
When you’re doing adding places, click the Record a Tour button in the toolbar.
This will open a record.
Click on the first place (San Francisco) and then click the red Record button. Then, click on each place in the order you want them to appear in the video. Google Earth 3D will animate from one place to another as you are recording in real time. When you are done, click the Record button again to stop recording. You’ll then see a video player control bar.
Click the Play button to play the video. If you are happy with it, click the floppy disk (seriously, Google?) button to save the video. It will add a video item to the list of places.
Export the Video
To export the video, click Tools > Movie Maker. If it is grayed out, close the video player control bar.
Specify a file path and name, choose video parameters (e.g. 1080p), and an output file type (e.g. H.264), and then click the “Create Movie” button.
Convert Video
The video will be exported but you may not be able to open it in certain applications like Corel VideoStudio even though it opens in VLC. To fix this, install Handbrake and convert the video to MP4 format.
Other Examples
You can make videos from other angles and elevations as well. For example, if you hold the Shift key and drag, you can rotate your view. Then, add a place marker at the view you want to save. Google Earth Pro will animation smoothly from each place marker. For example, here’s a video going from the Sulemaniye mosque to the Grand Bazaar.
