Having written a couple of posts with the Hexo static site generator I wanted to start building out my site with extras such as Pocket links and details about my side Projects. Trying to extend the site has proved harder that I thought it might, so I'm going to switch over to another platform for publishing. This is likely going to be based on Spring Boot which I had previously considered writing after trying JBake.

What I liked about Hexo originally was that I could easily publish to Netlify out of the box. It looked like I would only be able to publish the static output as part of a build step outside of Netlify. So I started to look around for an alternative and ended up on a site called StaticGen which I think is produced by Netlify and lists out all their known Static Site Generators. Turns out there were plenty of Java based generators. One of them, called Orchid, had a Deploy to Netlify badge indicating that a Java project might be supported by Netlify, if not offically documented or easily found.

The starter project that you can deploy to Netlify is available through the github repo JavaEden/OrchidStarter. The process of deploying to Netlify was simple and the deployment uses the gradle wrapper to download and execute the build step for Orchid.

My preference is to use Maven over Gradle so I investigated the possibility of using maven to generate the site and have that deployed on Netlify.

Starting with a standard maven project

mvn -B archetype:generate \
  -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes \
  -DgroupId=com.robintegg.blog \
  -DartifactId=netlify-upload

Influenced by the Gradle Wrapper, there is a Maven Wrapper available. The wrapper can be added using the maven task

mvn -N io.takari:maven:wrapper

**Windows Users **Be aware that the ./mvnw command needs to retain it's executable state when being deployed to GitHub so that it can be executed by Netlify. The Lennart Schedin blog provides details and explanations on how to do this. The commands for changing the permissions are summarized below:

>git ls-tree HEAD
    100644 blob 55c0287d4ef21f15b97eb1f107451b88b479bffe mvnw
>git update-index --chmod=+x .mvnw
>git status>git commit -m "Changing file permissions"
>git ls-tree HEAD
    100755 blob 55c0287d4ef21f15b97eb1f107451b88b479bffe   mvnw

For supporting the Netlify deployment, you can add the optional netlify.toml which will override any deploy settings you might have set in the UI.

[build]  base    = ""  publish = "target/site"  command = "./mvnw clean site"

Now, you can publish to Github and deploy the project through Netlify.

My finished Github repo teggr/netlify-upload and is was automatically deployed to https://compassionate-easley-929b6f.netlify.com.