So, You’ve Deployed a Project?

Congrats! Now what?

Introduction

One of the major accomplishments a software engineer or web developer can achieve is finishing and hosting and deploying a project. Whether this be on the job or for personal pleasure, this is no small feat. The amount of time, energy, and planning needed is is not something to brush aside.

Now that a project is live, there’s one thing to consider: how to add updates or make changes to the existing project. Larger scale projects, especially for the workplace, might use tools like Kubernetes or Docker. But for this article, I want to address tools that are more in line with smaller/personal style projects — Firebase and Netlify.

Some Background

When I went to deploy my first ever project, my portfolio site, a lot of my peers from my bootcamp cohort, who were also deploying their sites, were using Firebase. Since this seemed like a logical choice, given my site needs, I went about hosting and deploying through Firebase. The documentation is super easy to follow and set up can be done directly through the project directory via the command line. Pretty nice, right? No complaints, everything was up and running a-okay.

For a recent project, I decided to branch out and use Netlify. While similar, one of the major benefits of Netlify is projects can be connected to Netlify via the project’s GitHub repository. Really simple, right? Select the desired repo to connect, follow the instructions, and bam — it’s up and running.

Making Updates

Now, for the meat and potatoes of this article — how to update the site.

Netlify

If the project is deployed via the GitHub repo, as described above, updates are very simple. Any changes that are pushed to main branch(or whichever branch was selected to be deployed), will be automatically updated. That’s it! Easy peasy. As a preventative measure, always be sure to test code before deploying, and make sure you’re working in and pushing to the correct branch!

Firebase

While incorporating a few more steps, updating a project with Firebase is still straight forward. Again, once all changes have been tested and any sort of version control changes updated, simply add this command via CLI in your project directory.

$ firebase deploy --only hosting

And, voilà! It’s updated. If using Firebase, I highly recommend checking out this article first.

Conclusion

Firebase and Netlify are great and easy resources for getting a project off the ground and deployed. And, not to forget, also free. Keeping everything updated is a breeze given how seamlessly these programs were created and designed. Using the above steps, and also, ALWAYS using the documentation, will help your projects always be in tip top shape.

As a side note, GitHub Pages is also a great, free resource for deploying projects straight from a repository.

Check these out, and happy coding!