A lot of people have been talking about using Netlify recently, so I thought I'd see what all the fuss is about.

I decided to move my Laravel style guide to Netlify to give it a go, and was pleasantly surprised with how much simpler it is to use than what GitHub Pages is, which I was using previously.

Netlify hooks into your git provider of choice - GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket at the time of writing - watch a specific branch, then run a command whenever a commit is pushed to that branch. Continuous deployment and delivery of your static site.

With GitHub pages, I always found myself messing up the gh-pages branch, particularly as I was often pushing changes from more than one machine. I haven't seen any of these issues so far, and the entire build process is managed by Netlify.

It detects your package.json and composer.lock files, and installs your dependencies automatically and even caches them so your subsequent builds are lightning fast. The only downside, is that Netlify uses PHP 5.6 by default, but this is easily configured.

How simple is the whole process? I set a ten minute time limit on myself to get from 0 lines of code, to deploying a TLS-enabled, CDN-hosted site on Netlify. Watch the whole thing in realtime below - including running NPM and Composer installs.