Publishing and Releasing Your Website
The publication is a way to prepare your website for the web so that you can make it available online with a hosting service.
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When you click on the File menu (☁ cloud symbol) and then Publish, Silex will generate an optimized version of your website, without the data needed to edit the file, and with several improvements for the search engines and users.
When you click the "publish" button from the "file menu", Silex asks you to choose a "hosting provider". Hosting providers make it easy to push your website from within Silex to a hosting service such as Github pages. This will be done after the website has been cleaned up and optimized in the first phase of the publication process.
Here are the default hosting providers in Silex:
- Choose from a folder: it opens the file picker for you to choose a folder where the optimized files will be pushed. This is a good option if you bought web hosting from a hosting company such as Gandi or indie hosters, and they provided you with an FTP or SFTP access to your files.
- Github Pages: this is the free hosting service provided to the community by Github. You will need a Github account to be able to push there. Learn more about Github pages on their website
- Jekyll layout: this is a publication option to publish your website as a jekyll layout, so each page will become a layout available in your Jekyll pages and posts. There is an example Jekyll site which can be used to start with this option: follow the instructions there.
The next step for you will probably be to make it available to the public. If you want to make your site available online, you will need a hosting. With Silex you have several options:
Simply select "Github pages" and then select the root folder of your website on Github, this will publish you website on Github pages and give you the link to your website
Here is a quick guide to host your site on Github and host it at Netlify which is free and let you use your own domain name for free. Please open an issue to discuss this if you need more info.
To start, publish your site as described above, in a folder on github, let's call it test-github, and in a sub folder called master (this is important). Then open netlify.com and click "add a site". Select "github" and your test-github repository which has been created by silex.
Finally click the adress which is given to you by Netlify (click the website name), and you should see your website. Every time you publish your site, Silex will update it on Github and Netlify will re-deploy it automatically.
If you do not want to deal with the complexity of a "real" hosting, you can publish to your Dropbox, and then use a service like My.DropPages, Site 44, Pancake.io or Forge, to get it live on the web. Or you can use Bitballoon or netlify, but these do not support Dropbox.
These services let you make a dropbox folder available online, with a domain name like yourname.site44.com. They are free to use, but you need to pay to use your own domain name, and it is a little bit more expensive than a "real" hosting - around $10/year instead. In fact the only drawback I see for these services is that the companies behind them are very fragile and may close from one day to another.
It is recommended that you host your site yourself. This means that you will let a web hosting company or a non profit organization to put your data online - this may be free or paid service. You will then receive codes to access the folder they provide, so that you can transfer your data through FTP (automatic with Silex).
In the settings panel described above, click the browse button to open the file browser, and select FTP from the side bar - the third icon in the picture below.
Then publish your site. Silex will transfer all the files to the remote folder.
Any web host can host the web sites you published, since it is only HTML, CSS and Javascript files. In case you need one, Silex Labs foundation recommends these hosting companies:
- Toile libre (website in french), french non profit organizations which offers a web hosting service for free, accepting donations and using only free software
- Ouvaton (website in french), french cooperative hosting company
- Arvixe which supports Silex development since 2010.