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Comment by bndw | Hacker News Reader

Answering as the author who also understands the fundamentals of all of the technologies involved and questions much of what goes on in the minds of today's web developers and designers--

I use Make as the standard way to interact with every repo I own. This allows me to type `make build` instead of `$some-language-specific-command-I-forget-in-2-weeks`.

I use Docker for distributing every app I build. If the app is a website I also use the nginx base image. Docker images make packaging and distribution a breeze IMO.

Regarding yarn, npx, react, and jest: I'm similarly disillusioned by the churn but I also like to remain knowledgeable as the industry evolves. React was something I hadn't touched before, so I decided to pick a simple project to give it whirl ;)

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But now you’re paying for keeping a server online, whereas a GitHub page could’ve hosted this static website for free.

He did this for fun, his motivation wasn't to find the cheapest way to host his content.

It's also not like you'd have to have a separate server/vserver for every such project, a very affordable vserver will run quite a lot of nginx containers. Plus I guess some people will have a vserver or something like that anyway (I have a small one to get around NAT at the ISP level), in which case it might be net-zero.

>get around NAT at the ISP level

genuinely interested in the benefits of this. care to share?

My ISP puts everyone behind some sort of NAT, which means I can't reach my home network from elsewhere since I can't open ports. They'd let me buy my own IP address for a monthly fee, but I've found that an old Pi I already had, an autossh-ed reverse shell, SSH forwarding and a cheap cloud instance work just fine for checking sensors and the like, cost less and the cloud instance has other uses, too.

I see, so NAT traversal over SSH as opposed to VPN/DDNS

I honestly don't understand where's the fun in using docker for anything.

Unless one is into masochism.

Especially to host what could be implemented as a single static HTML file.

React is compiled to static content so this could be hosted with GitHub pages too

There's no reason that this would have to be hosted on a traditional server.

I build static sites in Docker too. But then simply extract the built files out and upload them to any static hosting I need.

This allows me to self contain all the build tooling. And allows other developers to setup a dev environment in a few easy steps.

Free as in beer, yes

> I use Make as the standard way to interact with every repo I own.

After much fussing around with many kinds of solutions, this too is what I have settled on. Download repo and run `make` will "do the needful" to get you going, and all the major entry points are make stanzas.

except that "making" anything, or any commands in a new language he forgot, etc = entirely unnecessary for a single static html page.

> I use Make as the standard way to interact with every repo I own. This allows me to type `make build` instead of `$some-language-specific-command-I-forget-in-2-weeks`.

I also used to do this until I switched out Make by Just[1]. I find it worth a recommendation.

https://github.com/casey/just

Just like perl and grep, I stick to make because it's likely to be already available everywhere I need it. Such is the tyranny of the installed base. :/

I second this. “just” is like make, but without the extraneous/confusing parts.

make all and make run would be more standard, no?

I liked your page. I might even use it!

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