In our previous post on Deploying a Preview Release of Site Using Netlify, we set up Netlify to build and deploy a preview of our site every time we created or updated a pull request that also included all of our draft and future posts.
In this post, we will look at how to deploy a git branch every time a commit is pushed to the branch to test out what our production site will look like before deploying to production. Unlike the preview deploy in the last post, the staging deployment will not include draft and future posts and mirror the production site configuration.
In our previous post on Deploying Your Hugo Site Using Netlify, we set up Netlify to automatically deploy our site every time we pushed a commit to our GitHub repository. As well, we set up a custom domain for our site.
In this post, we will look at the preview deploy feature of Netlify to build and deploy to a preview/staging site when we create or update a pull request.
When you create a new Netlify site, a preview site is set up out of the box to build every time you create or update a pull request. The build configuration will match the configuration of your production site. It is fantastic that Netlify set this up for us. However, to take full advantage of having a preview site, it would be helpful to include future and draft posts to make sure they look right before publishing them to production. It would also be nice to be able to test new versions of Hugo in a preview environment before updating production.
In our previous post on Creating a Blog Using Hugo, we installed Hugo, created a new site, added a theme, and created our first post.
In this post, we will be deploying the site that we created using a free account at Netlify. The site will be re-built and re-deployed whenever we push a new commit to our site’s Git repository. We will also look at how to set up our site using our own domain and create an SSL certificate.