I’m working on a project that will allow users to deploy sites to their Netlify accounts.
After digging through the documentation, the open-api docs, the requests made on the Netlify dashboard, code for the netlify-api and netlify-cli packages, asking some friends who work at Netlify and trying a lot of things out, I’ve finally managed to get an initial version of my integration working (a deployment that contains a single html file), but I’m struggling to get past that. Here are the steps I’m currently taking (I’m coding in PHP in case that makes a difference, and would be willing to share all the code that powers this process):
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First, I get the sha1 hashes for the files I want to upload. I’ve been testing with sites that have around 300 files (including images), but I expect way bigger sites once the project is launched, in case that makes a difference in any way.
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Then, I try to create a deployment by POSTing to the /deploys endpoint and specifying the hashes. I was initially adding the async flag (as I plan to be handling large sites) but that caused the API request to return no content (not even a deploy id I could poll for status), so I temporarily removed the flag (I’d also be interested in help to make that work).
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Then, I start PUTing the required files using the /deploy/:deployId/files/:path endpoint. For future reference, the path needs to be urlencoded (I think this is mentioned in the documentation but it was still confusing for me, as it looks like it’s part of the path). You should also make sure to get rid of trailing slashes at the start of the path, as it makes Netlify not recognize the file you’re uploading.
That’s where I’m stuck now. Netlify randomly throws empty 401 responses when uploading the files (I’m sending the token via the header). I also got some errors where Netlify complained that the file I was uploading was different to the one before, but I’m only getting the 401s now.
As I mentioned, I’m building a product where the core functionality relies on this API, so I’d love to get some help on this, ideally getting a contact of someone who works at this part of the platform and can guide me on properly implementing this.
Finally, thank you for making an awesome platform (and making it free, as a 17-year-old who started coding with HTML I can tell you it makes a difference). The developer experience at Netlify is awesome at almost all parts of the platform (except the API but I’m guessing that’s not where the focus is at the moment, and that’s understandable :D), and you’ve done an amazing job at making the web truly open for everyone. Thanks!