Ignore It, then Deploy It

Today I realized I wanted to set this thing up for real continous deployment — I no longer wanted to have to drag and drop to deploy the thing. I like using git even for personal projects, so it’s a no-brainer to make it so that pushing to remote causes a deploy.

I set it up on Netlify kinda by default, simply because it was in the eleventy tutorial’s deployment section, and I gotta say: it’s nice to be back! I used to play around with Netlify a lot in the past, but haven’t had a need to for a long time (as I was using surge.sh, Github Pages, or Blot, depending on what I was working on).

And those are all good tools for what they are! But with Eleventy, I’m trying to do it The Eleventy Way™️, and so using the first thing they mentioned in the tutorial felt right. 😀

A tiny gitignore explainer

I also knew that I never want to throw a git repo on GitHub without creating a .gitignore file. For the uninitiated, that’s a file that tells git, “hey, don’t ever include these files in the repo.” Briefly speaking, this prevents you from checking in:

• files that don’t need to be in your repo and that take up a bunch of space, like your nodemodules folder
• stuff that operating systems or apps use that have nothing to do with your project, like VS Code settings or all the junk that macOS dumps into folders
• most importantly: app secrets, environmental variables, and anything else that could result in something terrible like your API getting published for anyone to grab and use

That last one is a huge gotcha, and a bit of the reason why I use deployment services in the first place: people have built deploy tools that mean I’m not working too close to the metal. I like safeguards that prevent me from getting a giant web hosting bill, don’t you?

Let’s build that file

As a front end dev I’m absolutely well-versed in using a git ignore file, but I’m rarely the originator of it. At my last job, we inherited a lot of ignore files since our app began with us forking Backstage.

So this time, it ’s my turn!

The Eleventy docs weren’t super helpful, and neither was the actual Eleventy .gitignore file, since it…had a lot of stuff that felt very specific to the project, not to what a user like me would need.

After some Googling, I ended up finding a couple of sources for my main tools: VS Code, on a Mac. I also found someone’s basic boilerplate version and deleted ths stuff I figured I wouldn’t use. I kept the sources in the file, both for me, and so I can credit them. You can see the file in the now-published GitHub repo. Hooray for tools built by folks!

A non-zero amount of what’s in that file represents things I haven’t built yet, like environmental variables and such. To me, that makes it a good safeguard — it’s already there when I do need it, and it prevents my “go go go” hyperfocus brain from missing the important stuff later.

Time to deploy

After I’m sure I have that all ready to go, it’s time to deploy. I used the GitHub CLI to push the local folder to a GitHub repo. From there, I followed the defaults in Netlify, and I did run into one hiccup: because I’m using eleventy 3.0, the default eleventy build command failed.

I changed it to npx @11ty/eleventy@canary, which is the local build command, and now it’s all up and running! 🥳