I am sometimes struggling with regressions in Webflow projects, especially when multiple people work on the same site. Webflow Backup function is great for finding and reverting to the last working revision, but it’s impossible to know what was the change that caused the regression. Personally, I also like to self-review changes that I made at the end of the coding session.
That’s why I created Webflow Git - a simple, free utility to track changes to a Webflow site on GitHub. It’s a kind of a version control system supporting the Backup, that can monitor changes to the generated stylesheet as well as pages content.
Hey, this seems amazing. I assume it would work as a way to host Webflow sites through Github pages without having to download, extract and push them manually?
I actually developed something similar in node, but which listened to “publish” webhooks instead of crawling at certain intervals. I’m not familiar with how this is developed (never heard of Github utilities (?)), but would any kind of webhook listening be a possibility?
Publishing to Github Pages wasn’t really my intention - the idea was versioning to visualize changes to a site. I didn’t see much benefit of hosting a site somewhere outisde of excellent Webflow hosting, especially because assets will still be hosted by Webflow. However, when I think about it now it might be useful for example to fully customize redirect rules, e.g. hosting multiple sites under a single domain. I will think about adding it…
I didn’t realize there are webhooks available in Webflow - thanks for pointing it out! The benefit of polling is that it doesn’t require any setup in Webflow or generating an API token. I think I will add an option to disable polling and listen to publish events - GitHub also exposes webhooks that can trigger workflows, so it should work.
I am not certain if I understand your question. Yes, it tracks changes by monitoring a specific domain, so it can be a webflow-default domain, a custom subdomain as well as top-level domain. It doesn’t need access or any changes on Webflow.
Take a look at this feature request. There seems to be a tool called Flowgator that could do what you are looking for (the link doesn’t work, not sure why, it used to work when I read about it few months ago).
Amazing, thank you that worked! I tried a few more of my sites and while they all still work, one is reported a “CSS file not found”. I’ll send you a DM.
I answered your message - Webflow uses many different locations where it stores the CSS file (I suppose it evolved), and the script wasn’t recognizing the one used on your site.
I have added a new pattern to the script, it should work now.
I realized that it’s easy to achieve what you are asking for with my little tool.
I haven’t implemented the Github Pages support (which I will probably do it in the near future), but you can host your site with other service, such as excellent Netlify, which is super fast, offers a lot of customization, advanced redirection rules, and more.
Here’s a step-by-step guide (I will update the README later):
Give Netlify necessary permissions to your repository created from Webflow Git template, containing your website and select the repository (refer to the official documentation if you encounter any issues).
Leave the build settings empty and click Deploy site (no build is necessary and you will be hosting from root directory)
Now you can visit your site (URL is in the header of the project, and you can connect your custom domain). Every time you make changes on Webflow, they will be picked up by Webflow Git, pushed to Github and deployed on Netlify.
The build is currently based on polling, so next time you make any changes in Webflow, you might have to wait up to one hour until they are visible on your mirrored domain. I will make it event-based later, but it requires authentication to Github, so a bit of extra complexity and external webhook tool when configuring your site.
Please keep in mind that assets (images, videos, aniomations, etc.) are still hosted by Webflow. Also note that forms, e-commerce and other dynamic functionality will still be handled by Webflow.
Click Settings, the Pages. Select master branch and (root) directory.
Then configure a custom domain (links won’t work in a directory). Add a CNAME record pointing your subdomain to .github.io, generate and enforce certificate, and done.
Please keep in mind that assets (images, videos, aniomations, etc.) are still hosted by Webflow. Also note that forms, e-commerce and other dynamic functionality will still be handled by Webflow.
Would love to use something like this to auto publish to our own static hosting infrastructure (Cloud Platform) while still having Webflow available as the design tool around.
Do changes, publish to example.webflow.io, have the changes synced to Github & let the Devops workflow take the code and deploy to hosting infrastructure of choice.
I am primarily looking to cut out Amazon Web Services from the equation here due to it not conforming to our sustainability requirements.
@phillvdm - From what I can tell Webflow has gone after any service that scrapes/pulls down a project for use anywhere else and they are big users of open source software so I find it perplexing. Technically there is nothing to stop you from leveraging existing tools to accomplish this on your own. I am not a lawyer so I don’t have a position on the legality of the TOS. I have pointed out before that they recommend the use of reverse proxies for specific scenarios and since that technically makes a copy of a sites pages onto another server I don’t see how that is not in conflict with the TOS. I will just say that if you can’t get and maintain a complete backup of a clients work then you might have legal exposure on your own but then again, IANAL.
