Introducing Plek 3.0

Selwyn — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 13:07:07 +0000

Plek is the glue between serverless services like ZEIT Now and GitHub, improving your continuous deployment workflow. Serverless and continuous deployment go together like bread and butter, Plek accentuates on this with a defined flow and feedback to GitHub. Every deployment status is reported to GitHub and a domain is assigned based on the branch. On the main branch the deployment goes directly to your domain and for pull requests a subdomain is used to preview the changes. Resulting in a quick feedback loop where it is easy for everybody involved with a project to view changes.

Flow

Does this sound like the recently announced ZEIT Now for GitHub? Yes it does, these solutions certainly overlap. When releasing Plek this wasn't applicable since Now for GitHub got released about three weeks later. They serve different use-cases though because Plek runs from your CI as a CLI tool. This is a difference in responsibility, you have control over how and when Plek runs. This flexibility comes in handy for scenarios such as:

deploying monorepos, a repository that contains multiple packages or projects;
running tests before deploying;
using private npm packages in a Node.js project.

Whereas Now for GitHub is limited but easier to run because it runs from Now’s environment, meaning no CI setup is needed but also limits the possibilities. So if the Now to GitHub pipeline is all you need Now’s integration works fine. But if you want more, use Plek, did I mention it is open source too? Check it out at voorhoede/plek.

Fly

Plek is CI and service agnostic with the goal to support multiple serverless services and git platforms like GitLab. To prove that Plek is super flexible, we just released Plek 3.0 adding Fly as a service, more to come! Fly is an open source JavaScript runtime that gives you the power to create your own programmable CDN. With this power you can deploy anything from load balancers to static websites, combined with Plek it is easily deployed and tested.

Conclusion

Serverless is a cost-effective and easy way to deploy apps, deploy code and let services take care of it. With this power, continuous deployment becomes a natural way of going live. ZEIT Now and Fly integration from your CI is just a command away with plek now and plek fly.

DEV Community: Selwyn

Introducing Plek 3.0

Flow

Fly

Conclusion