Incremental builds without Vercel ISR

[jhgilbert]

Hi, I've been exploring options for incremental builds of large Astro sites outside of Vercel. This post on the Astro blog does a great job describing at a high level how this could work, but I didn't find as much support in the docs around the implementation details. For example, it took me a while to find the data store in prod, since it's in a different location than in dev (I'm new to Astro in general).

I did eventually figure out how I would set it up (reusing a cached data-store.json file, configuring the cacheDir location to where I want to keep the cached artifact, etc.), and wondered if it would be helpful for me to add something to your documentation around it. I've shared that blog post with my colleagues, but I'm finding that people want to see a more fleshed-out code example.

I wasn't imagining a full tutorial since the point is to bring your own infra, but I thought I could at least give a full example that uses some abstract placeholder functions representing the chunks of logic the reader would implement themselves depending on their infra (like the functions to send the store to cache / get the store from cache).

I'm also interested in learning more about the option for a dedicated build machine, since the blog post seemed to imply that a dedicated build machine with a "rebuild" webhook might be one of the recommended patterns.

I'm happy to write it and do the heavy lifting, I'd just appreciate a collaborator who could help me make sure I'm aligning with your overall design philosophies/preferred vocabulary/etc. (And if this isn't how I should go about incremental builds at all, that would be very helpful to understand as well!)

Thank you!

[sarah11918]

Hi @jhgilbert !

Thank you for being excited about contributing! 🙌

Normally in situations like this, where a contributor has a strong idea in mind already, we suggest publishing something on your own blog, or submitting to a site like https://astro-tips.dev where you have the freedom and liberty to explore ideas and produce content as you see fit without worrying about our conventions and particular standards or best practices (docs- or code-wise!). If you already have great ideas to share, there's no reason for us to hold it up!

That could be a great jumping off point for people to then discuss and collab on something that already exists, and this could turn into a docs recipe, for example, where it's fine to state upfront conditions so you can make assumptions and guide people through steps to achieve an opinionated goal. (This can be easier than talking in generalities, and shows people something from start to finish that will work if they follow it to the letter, and they are free to adapt to their personal project as they see fit.)

So that would be my first reaction to this! If you want to publish for Astro Tips, I do know that some maintainers there like probably @OliverSpeir in particular could be great resources and support for ISR-type content! Is that something that would interest you?