zola/docs/content/documentation/deployment/netlify.md

+++ title = “Netlify” weight = 20 +++

Netlify provides best practices like SSL, CDN distribution, caching and continuous deployment with no effort. This very site is hosted by Netlify and automatically deployed on commits.

If you don't have an account with Netlify, you can sign up for one.

Automatic Deploys

Once you are in the admin interface, you can add a site from a Git provider (GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket). At the end of this process, you can select the deploy settings for the project:

• build command: zola build (replace the version number in the variable by the version you want to use)
• publish directory: the path to where the public directory is
• image selection: Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 (default)
• Environment variables: ZOLA_VERSION with for example 0.8.0 as value

With this setup, your site should be automatically deployed on every commit on master. For ZOLA_VERSION, you may use any of the tagged release versions in the GitHub repository — Netlify will automatically fetch the tagged version and use it to build your site.

However, if you want to use everything that Netlify gives you, you should also publish temporary sites for pull requests.

This is done by adding the following netlify.toml file in your repository and removing the build command/publish directory in the admin interface.

[build]
# assuming the Zola site is in a docs folder, if it isn't you don't need
# to have a `base` variable but you do need the `publish` and `command`
base    = "docs"
publish = "docs/public"
command = "zola build"

[build.environment]
# Set the version name that you want to use and Netlify will automatically use it
ZOLA_VERSION = "0.8.0"

# The magic for deploying previews of branches
# We need to override the base url with whatever url Netlify assigns to our
# preview site.  We do this using the Netlify environment variable
# `$DEPLOY_PRIME_URL`.

[context.deploy-preview]
command = "zola build --base-url $DEPLOY_PRIME_URL"

Manual Deploys

If you would prefer to use a version of Zola that isn't a tagged release (for example, after having built Zola from source and made modifications), then you will need to manually deploy your public folder to Netlify. You can do this through Netlify's web GUI or via the command line.

For a command-line manual deploy, follow these steps:

1. Generate a Personal Access Token from the settings section of your Netlify account (not an OAuth Application)
2. Build your site with zola build
3. Create a zip folder containing the public directory
4. Run the curl command below, filling in your values for PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN_FROM_STEP_1, FILE_NAME.zip and SITE_NAME
5. (Optional) delete the zip folder

curl -H "Content-Type: application/zip" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN_FROM_STEP_1" \
     --data-binary "@FILE_NAME.zip" \
     https://api.netlify.com/api/v1/sites/SITE_NAME.netlify.com/deploys