This site was built, deployed and hosted on Netlify for almost two years. There’s a lot to like about Netlify, from its easy-to-use interface to the thoughtful features that allows statically generated sites to have dynamic like features like analytics to forms.
But for a few months now there was a part of my publishing process that was causing a little bit of resistance. That was that Netlify doesn’t support the latest versions of Bundler. My site is built using Jekyll. Jekyll being written in Ruby, relies on Bundler to handle package management.
My own machine uses the latest version of Bundler, but Netlify is quite behind. At first, I got around this issue with just manually changing the Bundler version in the Gemfile.lock that is versioned. But that becomes a nuisance because I can’t just “publish” my latest changes.
A few months back I had heard about a new service called Render. I had first heard about it through Lynne Tye of Key Values. Render looks to be creating a sweet set of products for web developers. One of them being, building, deploying and hosting static sites. So last night, I took Render for a spin.
All I had to do was hook up my site’s repo. I made sure the Gemfile.lock file had the latest Bundler version and committed. Render immediately picked up the commit and started working away. I was expecting a build failure warning but to my delight, my site actually was built and deployed to their CDN.
No doubt, Render had won me over. I pointed my DNS over to Render and that was that. My site is now happily hosted on Render. If you’ve got a Jekyll site and have issues deploying on Netlify, definitely give Render a try.
By no means, is this article suggesting I’m not a fan of Netlify anymore. But for building Jekyll sites, Render doesn’t hinder me from publishing.
I’m also looking forward to hosting an application on Render soon with their app hosting and managed PostgreSQL databases.
