I was inspired by @hbillings to try deploying
some non-Jekyll-, non-Hugo-generated content to
Federalist after she told me that it can be
configured to use Node.js as the builder. After poking around in the
documentation, I was delighted to find out how easy it is: Federalist will
publish anything in the _site directory as static content. You can use
anything to build your site! Federalist doesn't care! It just provides Jekyll
and Hugo as a convenience!
As a first test,
this repo
contained a simple npm script and no dependencies. The script created the
_site directory and wrote some text into an index.html file there. Bam,
Federalist published it. So nice!
One important lesson I learned: you must have a package-lock.json file
because Federalist uses the npm ci command instead of npm install. So... be
aware of that.
As a second test (not that it was really needed), I added
Gatsby, and then updated the
npm script
to perform a Gatsby build and then move the output to the _site directory. I
was not surprised, but still pleased, that Federalist was happy to pick up my
files and publish them. Cheers, Gatsby on Federalist!
Now that I've shown myself how to do this, I'll archive this repo because it's just taking up space otherwise. But now we both know what it was for, and that makes this README worthwhile.