[HN Gopher] Show HN: Instant preview for static websites
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       Show HN: Instant preview for static websites
        
       Author : kjksf
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2021-09-28 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.instantpreview.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.instantpreview.dev)
        
       | kjksf wrote:
       | I've built a thing for myself and maybe it'll be useful for
       | others.
       | 
       | https://www.instantpreview.dev/ is like an instant, temporary
       | Netlify or Vercel or Cloudflare Pages etc.
       | 
       | The difference? No hassle (no account needed) but also not
       | permanent. Uploaded website expires after ~2 hrs
       | 
       | Why build it?
       | 
       | I have several projects where I generate static website. I often
       | want to preview it before deploying.
       | 
       | Both Vercel and Netlify have cli that allows creating a preview
       | but there's a lot of ceremony (need an account, need to create a
       | project, need to create access token, keep the tokens secret).
       | 
       | So I made Instant Preview where you don't need any of that. Just
       | upload files either by drag&drop in the browser or from cmd-line
       | with curl and I'll create a private (hosted under random url),
       | temporary (expires in ~2 hrs) preview of a static website.
       | 
       | It's not a web hosting service, just for previews. That's why
       | expires in 2 hrs.
       | 
       | Can also upload from code (do a POST to
       | https://www.instantpreview.dev/upload with either form-encoded
       | name/content or raw ZIP file). Will return a URL for the content.
       | 
       | Concept inspired by transfer.sh, except for static websites and
       | not files.
        
       | velcrovan wrote:
       | I'm a forty year old idiot that still just uses a web server
       | running on a VPS. If I want publicly accesible preview I'll scp
       | them to a temp folder on the web server. I am probably missing
       | out on something by not using Netlify but I still haven't been
       | able to figure out what. (Caveat, I'm the sole developer on all
       | my projects; maybe that affects the calculus somehow)
        
         | is_true wrote:
         | I do the same. Need to handle traffic? Cloudflare.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | sneak wrote:
         | Most SSGs expect the site to be deployed to the root of a
         | domain, not in a subdirectory. Unless all of your URLs are
         | relative (including fonts, css, anything in js, et c) your
         | approach probably won't work.
         | 
         | Also, your sole VPS will fall over nearly instantly with any
         | significant amount of traffic; the web is a _lot_ bigger in
         | terms of eyeballs these days than it was when we started out.
         | 
         | These static services aren't bound by the capacity of a single
         | machine.
        
           | velcrovan wrote:
           | > Also, your sole VPS will fall over nearly instantly with
           | any significant amount of traffic
           | 
           | Wow, haha...no. Especially not with a static site. Even for a
           | wordpress site, a $5 VPS can easily handle in the tens of
           | millions of hits per day, and if that's not enough just add a
           | CDN in front.
        
       | eurasiantiger wrote:
       | Is it protected against zip bombs and ../../ style pathname
       | traversal?
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-28 23:01 UTC)