Why I never used netlify

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Hi, I checked netlify for half an hour or so and I think it is not for me.
I like your platform though, so I’m telling you why.

I’m inexperienced with website building and on top of that, I’m using an unorthodox pipeline. I use quarto, wasm-pack, tailwind and a hack on evcxr but haven’t installed npm. I built my site myself and it just serves fine with a python -m http.server.

Netlify was often praised so I figured I’d try it out after github-pages (fairly) complained that my repo was too large. Netlify really wanted to run build commands and install dependencies though.
Well, I just want to deploy my site, I already did everything for you. Maybe one shouldn’t commit their build artifacts, but github-pages encourages me to, so I didn’t feel weird about it.

Netlify has a ton of “helpful” features, that surely are actually helpful to others, but since there is no off-switch (netlify insisted on installing everything from my requirements.txt even though my python has nothing to do with the site building) it means Netlify demands I go learn “the way it should be used”.

I’d be sitting with Netlify now if it had less features. Vercel seems to have fewer features, or at least, no features hindering the deployment of a pre-built page. So my site is now happily living at exploratory-data-analysis

Thank you for your time and dedication (except the part where you closed-source a repo that used to be merging community pull requests. I understand that’s sometimes the way for a venture to thrive but I hope you reimbursed the volunteers whose code was accepted in some way, if there were any).
I understand if you just didn’t set out to cover my use case. Maybe, if other solutions start to fail I’ll go read up on what you think is The Way to publishing pages. Until then, fare well.

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@Jono Thanks for the post!

I don’t work for Netlify, but it’s not often you get to hear the reasoning behind why someone chose not to use a particular product or service, usually they just move along in complete silence.

It could be that you are doing something that’s just completely outside of Netlify’s target market, but hopefully they’re able to gain some useful insight.

3

Is this how you run the site in production? No, Netilfy doesn’t support HTTP servers, but then neither does Vercel. So I am curious how you are running it on Vercel and why that didn’t work on Netlify.

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I don’t know why it works, but it worked on github pages too (before I made it too large).
You can view my repo at GitHub - JJJHolscher/features2image_diffusion: Given features extracted from the activations of a vision model, train a diffusion model to reconstruct the images from those features.
it is served from the root folder and it’s just a static website.

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I’m pretty new to the Netlify community too, but I totally get where you’re coming from. I’ve also run into some of the automatic build stuff that feels like overkill when you just want to deploy a simple pre-built site. Sounds like your setup is quite custom, so I can see why the extra features weren’t a fit.