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Discussion on: How to schedule JAMstack deploys with Netlify and GitHub

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kontrollanten profile image
kontrollanten

Thanks for sharing! Where in the process are you running your tests? In Netlify? Personally I haven't found any beautiful way of solving that.

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stefanjudis profile image
Stefan Judis

I'm not running any tests at the moment. Did you have a look a build plugins? postbuild might be what you're lookin for?

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kontrollanten profile image
kontrollanten

I checked postBuild, but it doesn't really feel like it's the right place to run tests. I mean I want to have CI pipelines triggering different jobs depending on whats going on. Netlify is a build environment, so putting in the tests inside there just feels ugly (to me).

Actually I'm thinking about building something like Netlify, but instead of building the whole site, you just send all your static files. Then the flow would look like push > trigger CI > run linting, tests, etc > build and deploy static files > run e2e tests or whatever. That would mean that your CI env is responsible for all the actions. It would be interesting to hear your opinion, would that make sense?

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stefanjudis profile image
Stefan Judis

What you're saying makes sense to me. :) For projects that are more complex than my own site, I think going with a "classic" CI provider makes more sense. The engineering teams at my company use CircleCI paired with Netlify and they're pretty happy with that. That said...

Actually I'm thinking about building something like Netlify, but instead of building the whole site, you just send all your static files

I'm not sure if that's needed if you can chain and combine CI providers with Netlify etc. :)

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kontrollanten profile image
kontrollanten • Edited

Nice with someone with a different opinion! =D In my experience combining Netlify and CI environments works mostly fine, but I've had problems with

  • Multiple build environments. Sometimes the build works in CI, but not in Netlify or vice versa. Bumping node version, etc requires double config change.
  • Running e2e, lighthouse or something else after the site has been deployed isn't possible. I've created a small PoC of a bridge to solve that, but it shouldn't be that tricky.
  • It's illogical that the site is built two times. I'm building my site in the CI env to run packtracker and then it's built again in Netlify. Of course I can run packtracker inside Netlify, but then it starts getting messy with no separation of concerns.
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stefanjudis profile image
Stefan Judis

I see. :)

Yeah, I'm not very deep into the topic, but I can def imagine that there are many little details that make it trickier after a first look. I bet your three problems are only a few. πŸ™ˆ