GitHub / GitLab Pages to Netlify

While both GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages are adequate for most personal, group and project pages, when website size and / or traffic have grown beyond what is feasible for these solutions, a more comprehensive hosting provider like Netlify may be considered. Netlify provides its own CDN, so those that had been using Cloudflare for DNS and CDN can configure Cloudflare to provide only DNS, if they so choose. Netlify is free for single users, allowing a private GitLab, GitHub or Bitbucket repo (or other suitable source) to deploy to a public custom domain HTTPS website. SSL certificates can be user-provided or can be created through Netlify for your custom domain.

Why transfer site to Netlify

Netlify provides a comparison of GitHub Pages and Netlify. GitLab Pages allows user choice of static site generator (Hugo, Jekyll, etc.), while GitHub Pages allows only Jekyll. GitLab Pages private repos have a monthly runtime quota. Netlify has a monthly traffic quota on the free tier, and monthly build quota. For sites that are becoming very popular, GitHub Pages will simply want you to move elsewhere, while Netlify will have a paid plan to offer. This process may be too burdensome for those with limited IT or bandwidth resources, or simply the lack to time to learn how to do this.

Netlify uses webhooks to detect a git push to the website GitLab repo, and then builds the site. Netlify has a CDN and DDoS protection built-in. Even if the other features aren’t needed, a key feature is the ability to have the website code in a private repo with unlimited public website deployments and traffic.

Build minute limits (such as on GitLab and Netlify) can legimately be worked around by building the site locally on your laptop and pushing the publish-ready HTML.

Transfer site to Netlify

Note: This process may take down your site for a day or two if things go wrong. Even under normal conditions, all site visitors may need to allow an HTTPS exception due to SSL certificate error since Netlify requires all DNS servers to update before generating the domain certificate.

  1. if not already on GitLab, copy your website repo to GitLab (any name repo is fine).
  2. disable Auto DevOps and ensure no file named .gitlab-ci.yml exists.
  3. Login to Netlify using Gitlab, which will ask for your website repo.
  4. pick a custom Netlify subdomain like mycompany.netlify.app. Ensure this site is totally working before proceeding.
  5. Set Cloudflare or whatever your DNS provider is to point CNAME or A to mycompany.netlify.app (THIS IS THE PART THAT CAN TAKE YOUR MAIN WEBSITE DOWN!)
  6. Under Netlify Domain Management → HTTPS → Verify DNS config, ensure the verification completes. Until the DNS change propagates worldwide, your main HTTPS domain visitors are getting SSL verification errors. They can use https://mycompany.invalid instead of https://mycompany.invalid temporarily. Do this at a low traffic time range! If using Cloudflare CDN, the old records may point to DigitalOcean while the new records point to *.netlify.app