Do I need to make the build every time we are publishing a post?

[thimiraonline]

I want to know that, Do I need to make the build every time we are publishing a post? Or else will it update automatically once I publish a new post?

[styxlab]

Great question! The answer is: you can control it yourself with the settings in appConfigs.ts. Let me explain the background. next-cms-ghost uses Next.js and this framework has different page building modes. With the default mode (standard settings in appConfigs.ts), you need to re-deploy your project whenever you add a new post. In this mode next-cms-ghost acts like a static site-builder. You can/should send a webhook trigger from your Ghost CMS to your hosting provider (possible with Vercel and others). So, whenever you publish a new post, the webhook triggers a re-deploy.

Next.js has another mode, called ISR which stands for Incremental Static Regeneration. When you set the parameters in appConfig.js as follows:

export const isr: boolean = true
export const revalidate: number = 10
export const maxNumberOfPosts: number = 0
export const maxNumberOfPages: number = 0

you don't have to send a webhook. Instead, the entire website is automatically re-build 10 seconds after someone visited your site. This is an extreme case. In practice you may want to have something in the middle: generate all current articles on build time and only generate new articles dynamically. In this case you would configure as follows:

export const isr: boolean = true
export const revalidate: number = 10
export const maxNumberOfPosts: number = 10000
export const maxNumberOfPages: number = 10000

ISR can be costly (it consumes compute resources for each revalidate, in the above example every 10 seconds), that's why it has to be used with caution. Please visit the next.js documentation on ISR to find more about the pros/cons of both page building modes.