Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

gatsbyjs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#31

Post by jtdev »

skrebbel wrote: post #14

Having never used a static site generator in anger, can someone explain to me like I'm five what's going on here? My understanding is that Gatsby is a tool that converts a bunch of markdown files into a static HTML website. Why is slow builds a problem for any static site generator? Why does it need a cloud? In other words, what problem am I supposed to be having that any of this solves? Note, I'm trying not to be sk…

None of the answers/comments below even come close to answering the simple question that started this thread. This looks like an overly complex solution looking for a problem to me.

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#32

Post by makethetick »

elviswolcott wrote: post #23
skrebbel wrote: post #14

Having never used a static site generator in anger, can someone explain to me like I'm five what's going on here? My understanding is that Gatsby is a tool that converts a bunch of markdown files into a static HTML website. Why is slow builds a problem for any static site generator? Why does it need a cloud? In other words, what problem am I supposed to be having that any of this solves? Note, I'm trying not to be sk…

Gatsby is a fairly complex static site generator. At the highest level, it provides an ingest layer that can take any data sources (CMS, markdown, json, images, or anything that a plugin supports) and bring them into a single centralized GraphQL data source. Pages (which are built using React) can query this graph for the data they need to render. Gatsby then renders the React pages to static HTML and converts the qu…

Hi, have you thought about hosting for this yet? I've got a similar site which I originally tried on AWS Amplify but it got too big for the artifact size limit so I opted for S3/Cloudflare instead however build times are slow and more of a manual process currently.

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#33

Post by yazboo »

jtdev wrote: post #31
skrebbel wrote: post #14

Having never used a static site generator in anger, can someone explain to me like I'm five what's going on here? My understanding is that Gatsby is a tool that converts a bunch of markdown files into a static HTML website. Why is slow builds a problem for any static site generator? Why does it need a cloud? In other words, what problem am I supposed to be having that any of this solves? Note, I'm trying not to be sk…

None of the answers/comments below even come close to answering the simple question that started this thread. This looks like an overly complex solution looking for a problem to me.

True. The article has a decent answer though. Incremental builds are necessary because:

> [Slow builds] can be annoying if your site has 1,000 pages and one content editor. But if you have say 100,000 pages and a dozen content contributors constantly triggering new builds it becomes just straight up impossible.

Gatsby needs a cloud to host this build server. They also apparently host a nice content editing UI.

If you don't need a content editing UI, and/or are fine maintaining your own static builds, you presumably wouldn't subscribe to the cloud service.

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#34

Post by dustingetz »

skrebbel wrote: post #14

Having never used a static site generator in anger, can someone explain to me like I'm five what's going on here? My understanding is that Gatsby is a tool that converts a bunch of markdown files into a static HTML website. Why is slow builds a problem for any static site generator? Why does it need a cloud? In other words, what problem am I supposed to be having that any of this solves? Note, I'm trying not to be sk…

Imagine MSDN as a static site

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#35

Post by kall »

yazboo wrote: post #33
jtdev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the answers/comments below even come close to answering the simple question that started this thread. This looks like an overly complex solution looking for a problem to me.

True. The article has a decent answer though. Incremental builds are necessary because: > [Slow builds] can be annoying if your site has 1,000 pages and one content editor. But if you have say 100,000 pages and a dozen content contributors constantly triggering new builds it becomes just straight up impossible. Gatsby needs a cloud to host this build server. They also apparently host a nice content editing UI. If you…

They don't host a content editing UI, only a "dynamic" version of the site that you can embed or link in a CMS for draft previews etc.

I use and like gatsby a lot and don't think it is generally overcomplicated for what it does. They are really pushing static at all costs though, and these cloud solutions are needed because of that. When seriously evaluting a 100.000 pages / dozens of editors project, if you ask what the benefits and the costs of static really are, I think you might come up with a different answer than Gatsby Inc. I think Zeit+Next actually has a better story there, because its not "static at all costs".

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#36

Post by orta »

dustingetz wrote: post #34
skrebbel wrote: post #14

Having never used a static site generator in anger, can someone explain to me like I'm five what's going on here? My understanding is that Gatsby is a tool that converts a bunch of markdown files into a static HTML website. Why is slow builds a problem for any static site generator? Why does it need a cloud? In other words, what problem am I supposed to be having that any of this solves? Note, I'm trying not to be sk…

Imagine MSDN as a static site

That is easy to do! https://docs.microsoft.com which is, to my knowledge, the MSDN replacement is built as a static site hybrid.

Here's a talk form one of the creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpYYe6aQjJM

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#37

Post by tomnipotent »

Touche wrote: post #25
denster wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a stab at this, Kyle just shoot me if I get something wrong below :D 1) There's a server-centric approach and a client-centric approach: --a) hand-maintained HTML + php falls into the first camp --b) React (/Angular/Vue) fall into the second 2) If you go with the second camp (b), you end up having a higher initial page load time (due to pulling in the whole "single page app" experience), but a great time tr…

(3) is incorrect, Gatsby initial page load times are mostly really bad. (2) is both overstated and overvalued. It's overstated because loading a static HTML page from a CDN is extremely fast. Too many people who point at this advantage for SPAs are thinking back to pre-CDN usage with slow origin servers. Of course there are still use-cases where going to network is not wanted, but these aren't the primary use-cases t…

> (3) is incorrect, Gatsby initial page load times are mostly really bad.

This has not been my experience, considering all HTML is ready to go from last byte so that other than blocking CSS, rendering can begin ASAP. At this point, no JS is required to interact with the page so things are generally pretty snappy while we wait for React hydrate to kick in.

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#39

Post by kylemathews »

denster wrote: post #11
kylemathews wrote: post #9

Gatsby founder here. Really appreciate the feedback and support for our launch today! The team worked super hard to get Incremental Builds live in public beta but are taking all the feedback (here and all over the web) as we go into full launch. Let us know what you think. Thanks!

Kyle, Just read the post, congrats on the launch! We've been using Gatsby on: https://mintdata.com for the past few years, and are huge fans of your work. I still recall the day when I brought Gatsby into our org, our front-end guys almost ate me alive :D They said: a React.render(...) + GraphQL thing, why do we need it? What's the big deal? Fast forward a few years later, and Gatsby dominates (in my opinion) the bes…

Glad it's been a great experience!

Re: Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud

#40

Post by kylemathews »

turadg wrote: post #3

This is great! Is there any technical limitation keeping this from being part of the open source version? I get that Gatsby company put a lot of effort into this and wants a return on that investment, and good for them. I assume a third party could offer the same but why would they compete at the same value prop. However an open source version to not be reliant on any company would be compelling to many.

We recently introduced build optimizations for incremental data changes for self-hosted environments: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/page-build-optimizations-for-i... and are continuing to improve build speed across platforms.

To reliably provide near real-time deployments, we need tight integration with the CI/CD environment to optimize and parallelize the work; that's why you’ll see the fastest builds and deploys through Gatsby Cloud — the platform is purpose built for Gatsby!

Post reply on HN