Show HN: Smokeshow – deploy ephemeral sites via HTTP or CLI

smokeshow.helpmanual.io

4 points·scolvin··6 comments

I've done this in the past using IPFS[0]. You can use a free pinning service like Infura[1] for previews or you can pin it however you like. You automatically get a subdomain {cid}.dweb.link or the gateway of your choice.

The downside is that the site will be broadcast to the IPFS DHT so if your site it sensitive before deploy it may not be suitable. And of course if you aren't going to deploy your site to IPFS at the end of the day it doesn't provide much benefit over a service like this.

[0] https://gitlab.com/kevincox/ricochetrobots/-/blob/98f5140898... [1] https://infura.io/docs/ipfs/post/add

Interesting, I find it surprising there isn't a widely used service with this functionality.

I mean there are. s3, netlify, ...

You can do this with most static site hosts. I guess the only real concern is trying to get dynamic subdomains.

I even wrote a small server to accept tarballs and dump them onto the filesystem so that they could be served by nginx. https://gitlab.com/kevincox/tardeploy (sorry, no docs)

Netlify offers much of the functionality but I hit the monthly build limit long ago for pydantic docs. Plus it's a pain to use for stuff like coverage.

S3 doesn't offer the redirect functionally and you would have to have your aws keys public in the repo.

So not really substitutes.

Dynamic subdomains aren't a problem for this with the smart redirecting logic.

Netlify has a trivial HTTP API so you can use your own CI and not bother with the build limit (and whatever software they happen to have installed on their CI)

I don't believe it can be used for previews. Also, it requires an api key, so can't be used on pull requests from forks on github actions.

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