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Comment by cheph | Hacker News Reader

Gatsby is probbably the worst static site generator that exists and I am not really sure what it brings to the table other than incredibly slow build times, pointless use of graphql (which falls apart quite quickly) and an over complicated framework which is difficult to customize and costly to maintain.

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Yes, I've seen the same problems from Gatsby and it wouldnt be my first choice, but I do really like it's use of GraphQL - i think it's a smart way to solve a problem that does exist for some use cases.

I like Gatsby's createPage API that lets you programatically create pages from source data at any url, rather than the "traditional" approach of binding views to URL patterns. It's useful for some kinds of static sites that might have a radically different template or data source/model for multiple pages that fit the same URL pattern.

Gatsby's use of GraphQL, which can be a pain especially as you scale larger, is nice how it lets you query just the fields you need, so your dehydrated data remains pretty minimal. It's something that I've struggle with when building a site with NextJS - I would have to set up and create my own GraphQL server.

Gatsby is a weird one because it has these "advanced" features that really benefit larger sites (or sites with larger ambitions), but Gatsby really can't handle large sites or data.

I found the GraphQL decision really works if you're combining multiple datasources. One example we built in practice is combining a CMS-as-a-service (Contentful, Prismic) and a webshop back-end as a service (Commercetools) to build rich product pages.

Yeah, it can be really helpful when you want to combine multiple data types/sources into a single meta type to query multiple types with just a single graphql query.

It turns out that building a site in plain HTML, without fancy tools, isn't nearly as difficult as using stuff like gatsby once you get down to it.

Hell, just throw in some PHP if you want dynamic bits and pieces. Your fancy netlify/cloudflare/vercel setup may not like it but your infinitely cheaper shared host/VPS provider will.

If you still wanted static output, you could probably serve it locally and then let wget crawl it for you.

> If you still wanted static output, you could probably serve it locally and then let wget crawl it for you.

Here's the complexity part that tools try to solve.

There are decoupled tools like https://statically.io/ to do this. One can have the straightforward builds of GP and still have good static site generation.

cool, we've just made something more complicated than netlify or whatever.

Looks like a great tool for migrating an existing dynamic site into a more static workflow, but it's not exactly the workflow I was replying to.

> infinitely cheaper

It's actually the opposite. Static site hosting is so much easier to optimize, that it costs just few cents a month, if anything at all (I never went beyond Netlify's free plan).

> I never went beyond Netlify's free plan

There you go. Go beyond Netlify's free plan and it can get pretty expensive.

Not really, you can just easily switch to another solution, like B2+Cloudflare, which costs pennies.

That's the cost of hosting the end result. How much of your precious time did you spend building your site in a way to make 'static site hosting' (i.e. a file server behind a CDN) work? Did you put time into some CI workflow on Github to precompile the site and push it to Netlify? Did you mess around with Netlify itself to build what you want?

I can do exactly the same with a cheap VPS running apache and PHP and a deploy is little more than an SCP or FTP upload away. I don't have to worry about a build pipeline at all.

I'm not aiming this at you, but in general I'd love to see how newer engineers would tackle things like deployment if they couldn't rely on some SaaS offering.

Or are we talking about static sites that are static because they do all the server side stuff on the browser, and you're pulling down things like react and graphql to render a blog post?

Nah, no CI workflow, I generate locally. Creating the site was just

  pip install pelican; git init . ; pelican-quickstart; vim pelicanconf.py  # to set the theme

Then to publish:

  pelican . && git add -A && git commit -m "post title" && git push

(I have a shortcut for this, of course)

But I think you overestimate the time to "setup the CI workflow" actually takes. It's just a text file where you put the commands above, so it can run on the server instead of your machine. There's no black magic to it.

> I don't have to worry about a build pipeline at all.

Of course you do; it's just that your build pipeline runs every time someone accesses your site.

> I'm not aiming this at you, but in general I'd love to see how newer engineers would tackle things like deployment if they couldn't rely on some SaaS offering.

I've done that too. I created a bare git repo on the server, with a post-receive hook that checkouts "master" and runs the static site generator. Then I had Nginx serve the directory.

I used Gatsby about 3 years ago and loved it. With that being said, I feel like it's grown well beyond it's useful value proposition for me.

The biggest value was I could share a lot of components between my app and marketing site. Even though most of the marketing site was static content, Gatsby made it incredibly easy to introduce well integrated custom features.

I never hit of the point of needing a full CMS (the site wasn't large enough), so it was great for my needs. Not sure why anyone would use it if they're going full CMS, though.

If you are looking for an efficient static site builder try YASSB! [1]

YASSB processes HTML, (S)CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, JSX/TSX, JSON, MarkDown and many other files and combines them into beautiful static websites.

I am the creator of YASSB, I'd love to hear what you think about it!

[1] [https://yassb-foss.github.io/](https://yassb-foss.github.io/...

Link: https://yassb-foss.github.io/

I've just started using Eleventy for our site. For someone completely new to this it was bit difficult to start but once off the ground have started to love it. The best thing is if any feature is missing you can quickly write a plugin in javascript.

I like that I can write pretty much normal React in it, and that it has a lot of features and plugins. But I'm still a pretty casual user probably.

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