Netlify

norska has been developed to make deployment on Netlify easy. In that regard, it tries to minimize the number of build minutes used by Netlify deployment. The method used is to cancel any build that wouldn't change the final generated content.

How it works

Whenever a build is made, Norska checks to see if it's running on Netlify and building for production. If both those conditions are true, then it starts a serie of additional checks.

It starts by getting the list of files in the repo that where changed since the last Netlify deploy. The SHA-1 of the last deployed commit is provided by Netlify; the rest is extracted from the git history.

It then cancels the build if no relevant file was changed since the last deploy.

Relevant files include anything in ./src, but also config files like netlify.toml, .nvmrc, tailwind.config.js, norska.config.js, etc.

If no such file was changed, it means that all changes since the last deploy were touching parts of the repo that shouldn't have any impact on the final deployed website. This could happen quite often in a mono-repo setup: you make a lot of changes to the codebase in ./lib, but you don't need to redeploy the documentation website each time.

In addition to checking for files, norska will also check for changed keys in the project package.json. If the dependencies key has changed (like a new version of norska, or any front-end dependency), then it will go through with the build.

Configuration

You can change the list of files and keys of package.json considered relevant by editing the norska.config.js file.

The default configuration is as follow:

module.exports = {
  deploy: {
    files: [
      'lambda/**/*',
      'netlify.toml',
      'norska.config.js',
      'tailwind.config.js',
      '.nvmrc',
      '<from>/**/*',
    ],
    keys: ['dependencies', 'scripts.build:prod'],
  },
};