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Setup a static website

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Static websites are easy to setup, secure, low maintenance and they are fast. They can also be hosted on for example GitHub, so no need to pay for a host machine.

Google PageSpeed Insights: PageSpeed

I was a bit confused at first on what is the best way to set this thing up. At first I followed the netlifycms "get started"-guide, but found out later that it's so much easier to setup straight from the Gatsby Starter Library. So I thought I would add some notes on how to actually set this stack up.

Setup a public site

  1. Head on to https://www.netlify.com/ and register if not registered already

  2. Go to Gatsby Starter Library: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/starters/ and select a starter site. I selected the gatsby-starter-blog because it's minimal and fast.

  3. Scroll down a bit and click the little Netlify icon under the preview image to set it up Starter

  4. Click Connect to GitHub ( Or GitLab ).

  5. Login and connect your account.

  6. Set a repository name and click Save & Deploy

  7. Wait for the site to deploy

  8. Follow the 3 step process to setup domain and SSL for your site. Setup process

  9. At this point, after finishing the 3 step process, the setup is already done. Allow some time for the DNS changes to take effect and your site will be online.

Setup a local dev env:

  1. Go to https://github.com/ and login to your account ( or GitLab )
  2. Netlify has created a repository for the gatsby site, clone the repo
  3. Download and setup NodeJS: https://nodejs.org/en/
  4. After installing, open Node.js command prompt

  5. Move to your gatsby repo that you just cloned:

    cd your-gatsby-repo 6. Install npm packages

    npm install 7. Start gatsby server

    gatsby develop 8. Local site is now up and running. Open browser and go to http://localhost:8000/

  6. Start modifying the default blog posts, author and layout the way you want.