One of the challenges with deploying static sites is that there's nothing
tracking any sort of site state, including when new content is published. This
post presents a technique to identify newly published content on an Eleventy
site and sending various notifications with content-specific data. Part 1 covers
identifying the new posts and collecting post-specific data.
This post details the GitLab CI pipeline used for this blog, which is built with
Eleventy. It's based on a collection of GitLab CI
templates that have evolved over several years for my published NPM packages
with a collection of end-to-end tests used for web applications and a few unique
jobs added specifically for Eleventy and Nunjucks templates. It's meant as an
illustration of a reasonably comprehensive CI pipeline for an Eleventy static
site, maximizing the level of automated testing, leveraging built-in GitLab
capabilities where practical, and optimizing parallelization and pipeline speed.
GitLab Pages
provide an easy means of deploying a site hosted on GitLab, but GitLab does not
provide support for creating Review Apps for a Pages site. This post outlines a
reusable technique to work around that and setup Review Apps with
Eleventy to enable creation of a unique, browsable
instance of a site with the changes in a merge request.