With our latest update, static deployments running on Now became almost twice as fast. Today, we are announcing the biggest set of improvements yet.
This update brings 9 new features that allow you to customize every aspect of the static serving pipeline, from aesthetic
URL changes to custom headers and redirections.
The best part:
now static deployments are fully compatible with serve, which means you can easily develop locally with
no changes at deployment time.New Features
Since static deployments first got to see the light of day about 2 years ago, at lot has changed.
In order to adapt to the ever-changing needs of frontend developers, we are now offering you a
completely open, free, and extremely flexible solution with our new static deployments.
Configuration
As of today, you can customize how your static deployment behaves in production by creating a
now.json file
with a static property:{ "static": { "trailingSlash": false, "rewrites": [...], ... } }
This property can contain any of these new configuration options:
public(Set a sub directory to be served)cleanUrls(Have the.htmlextension stripped from paths)rewrites(Rewrite paths to different paths)redirects(Forward paths to different paths or external URLs)headers(Set custom headers for specific paths)directoryListing(Disable directory listing or restrict it to certain paths)unlisted(Exclude paths from the directory listing)trailingSlash(Remove or add trailing slashes to all paths)renderSingle(If a directory only contains one file, render it)
Better Defaults
Out of the above options,
renderSingle, directoryListing, and cleanUrls are enabled by default. This ensures that the builds of most static site generators just work out of the box.Here is an example with Jekyll:
Hyper
▲ ~/my-app $ As you can see, no special configuration comes into play.
However, all of these defaults can be overwritten easily:
{ "static": { "directoryListing": false, ... } }
Once you have added the
now.json file to your project, it will automatically be uploaded to Now when you run now and
taken into account every time a request is served.Simulating Production
Now that static deployments are fully powered by serve-handler, they are
behaving just like our command line interface serve when run locally:
serve
As of version 7, you will then see a message like this one:
INFO: Accepting
connections at http://localhost:3000
When opening
http://localhost:3000 in your browser, you will notice that serve behaves
exactly like you configured your static deployment in now.json.That is because
serve now reads your deployment configuration and adapts itself. This means
you can simulate exactly how your project will behave when deployed to Now.Cached in Every Region
Because deployments are immutable, the implementation of the new core for static deployments
also allowed us to properly cache all assets served by serve-handler in
all our regions:
As you can see, the request was already once handled by serve-handler and is now cached.
However, this is just the start. Soon, you will be able to have your static deployments cached in many more regions automatically.
Deploy Everything
With the new options available to you, every single static framework and site generator becomes deployable. No restrictions. No tradeoffs.
We went ahead and deployed some of our favorites:
Open Source
This means that you can now – for the first time in the history of their existence – contribute
to how static deployments work.
We are happy to welcome any feedback, bug fixes, or other contributions.
Conclusion
With this release, we are opening up many new possibilities to developers. There is no
longer a need to run
serve, http-server, or any other static webserver within a Node.js deployment
in order to get the maximum in terms of customization.Instead, the default configuration is now already enough for serving the builds
generated by most static site generators (like
next export).And for cases in which you do need to add custom
redirects, rewrites, or any other form of custom behavior, our ever-growing list of options has you covered.Enjoy!