Moving From Gatsby to Scully (The Angular Static Site Generator)

Scully is in a alpha version at the time of writing this. So things are likely to change. I will update this post if anything changes in a beta/v1 release.

If you’re reading this that means I have finally moved this site from Gatsby to Scully! 🎉

What are you talking about?

Well, this website was originally build using GatsbyJS, a React static site generator. Personally, I prefer Angular, a web framework made by Google. So you guessed it. Scully is built on Angular.

This post isn’t going to be a detailed analysis but more of my thoughts behind the move and the different platforms

Overview

So why did I jump ship to a less user-friendly, beta version of a framework when things were working just fine? - Probably you

Well, I didn’t know much about React and it didn’t really gel with how I like to develop. I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening either. With Scully being so new and not as abstracted, I have a much better understanding and control over my site.

Pros

So the biggest pro to switching was the comfortability being in Angular vs React. I can work faster and write better code in Angular than React. I felt like I was just copying and pasting from docs when trying to get things working for React.

Another is the way you build projects, React doesn’t really have a set way of structuring and building apps, it’s very unopinionated. For me, I prefer the opinionated ways of Angular. Mainly about Angular services. In React, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to perform dependency injection. I ended up writing a lot of logic in the view layer itself which is just a recipe for disaster. This is not a slam of React, just the fact I haven’t spent enough time to know how to property architect apps in that framework.

Cons

A major con to the switch is the lack of plugins and the community. At the current moment, Scully has just reached beta and there’s only a handful of plugins. I had to write all the plugins by hand for all the things I was using in Gatsby, such as linked headers and Algolia search. I have high hopes the plugin ecosystem and community will grow around this project like what happened with Gatsby. In the meantime, I have to handroll all my own plugins.

Another con is development workflow is not as simple as gatsby. right now in order to build your Scully app, you have to run an angular build ng build, then a scully build scully, and finally serve the content, scully serve. If a change is made then you have to start over, there are watch commands, ng build --watch and scully watch, but I get an infinite loop of builds with both running. 🤷‍♀️ not sure what the issue is there. I plan on making a sample repo and reporting my issue if I can’t figure it out by then.

Parting Thoughts

End of the day I am happy with the move mainly because I can get more work done in Angular (Scully) than I can in React (Gatsby)

Some features I’d like to see in Scully would be the ability to emit some events from the <scully-content></scully-content> such as content loaded so I can perform events correctly, better documentation (it’s a beta, it’ll get better I know), a better dev workflow. more community participation.

You can view the entire source code for this site here

Want to learn about the custom plugins I made for Scully? Check out my post here