Overview
I've tested out a range of hosting and CI (continuous integration) providers for docs like code setups. This section includes deployment guides for my recommended options. I currently use Cloudflare Pages for my own sites.
Requirements
A docs like code setup usually involves:
- Documents written in a markup language (such as Markdown or AsciiDoc)
- A static site generator to build the website
- Source files stored under version control
- Ideally, automated testing and deployments
For any website project I have a few key requirements:
- Automated deploys on merge to main
- Automated preview builds on pull request
- Simple setup ("simple" is subjective, of course)
- A way to redirect pages to new URLs
For docs projects, I'd add:
- Automated linting (running Vale or textlint, Alex, and a link checker on pull request).
- Ability to encrypt build environment variables (using Material Insiders requires a GitHub access token, which I don't want to leave exposed in site settings).
- Reasonable pricing for a large number of contributors.
- Really simple setup: I want to be able to recommend this tooling to clients, without relying on them having devops resources available for their docs work.
And some nice-to-haves:
- A free tier (for testing and hobby projects at least)
- Easy domain and SSL setup
There are a few things I'm not looking for that you might want to consider:
- Access control (if you need your docs and/or preview builds behind a login).
- Analytics (I'm happy using Plausible, but some hosting providers offer built in options, which are convenient).
- Support for git providers other than GitHub.
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