What is and what is not netlify?

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Hi, @leela52452. Welcome to our Netlify community site! :slight_smile:

There are three ways to deploy sites at Netlify. There is more information about this here.

The workflow people most often are excited about is our continuous deployment.

With this workflow you create a new or link an existing git repo (which can be hosted at GitLab, Bitbucket, or GitHub) to a site at Netlify. The repo contains the markdown version of the site - the version before the static site generator is run.

When the site and repo are linked, webhooks are created to trigger new builds at Netlify when an update occurs to the git repo.

Then the workflow becomes this:

  1. Make changes to your local repo and test the changes on the local system.
  2. Run git push to push the commits to the upstream repo (which can be a private repo - it doesn’t have to be public).
  3. The Git service (for example, GitLab) sends a webhook to Netlify that the repo was updated.
  4. Netlify then does the following:
  • makes a new clone of the repo
  • installs any needed dependencies
  • runs the build command for the static site generator - aka “build the site”
  • if the build is successful, Netlify then uploads the new version of the site to our CDN and invalidates the cache for any files that have changed

So, yes, you can create the content at GitLab itself. Netlify then will clone this repo and do the build automatically when changes occur. If the build is successful, normally this new version is automatically publish.

Auto-publishing is the default, but you can also configure a site to not auto-publish. Netlify will still build the new version of the site, but won’t update the published version until that is done manually (with a button in the UI).

Again, there are two other ways to deploy, but this method is the most people use.

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