Hi folks!

In July, the Netlify team shipped tons of product updates, new tutorials and also celebrated the growing Jamstack ecosystem with Netlify’s quarterly Partner Kickoff. You can read an event recap here, where we announced four new database partners: DataStax, Fauna, Nimbella, and StepZen.

Read on to discover what’s new at Netlify. And if you want product updates like this in your inbox, you can subscribe to our newsletter here 👇

Building e-commerce sites on Netlify with Shopify’s new Storefront APIs

Shopify recently announced enhancements to their Storefront API that makes it possible for store owners to access and manage their entire store and inventory via APIs. To catch you up on the latest changes, we published new tutorials for building e-commerce sites with the Shopify Storefront API and Nuxt, Gridsome, and also one for Eleventy and serverless functions.

Learn about using the Shopify Storefront API on Netlify

Deploy Previews: Announcing a new GitLab integration, 2x free BrowserStack testing minutes, feature improvements

Netlify’s collaborative Deploy Previews help you gather better feedback from reviewers. Yesterday, Netlify announced a new GitLab integration for Deploy Previews. We also announced that Netlify users get 2x free BrowserStack testing minutes, and introduced new feature improvements, like adding text and emoji to screenshots, and personalizing your Netlify user settings from the Netlify Drawer. \ \ Read the GitLab announcement

Improved developer experience for monorepos, better caching for Yarn workspaces

If you work with monorepos on Netlify, you may be glad to know there’s some swanky new documentation available on this topic. We’ve made some changes to the developer experience, too. Now, when you get started with a “New site from Git” you’ll find an optional field labeled “Base directory” to make configuration easier, and there’s also improved caching for Yarn workspaces.

Read more about improvements to monorepos on Netlify

What else is new at Netlify?

Build wicked fast sites with Astro

One of the hot new frameworks on the scene is Astro, and it’s all about shipping less client-side JavaScript. If you want to learn more, check out this handy introduction to Astro. When you’re ready to scale, there’s even a guide for building an e-commerce site with Astro and serverless functions.

Getting your e-commerce Jamstack site ready for Core Web Vitals

Google’s latest ranking update includes the addition of three speed metrics to the search engine’s ranking algorithm. Learn what updates to Core Web Vitals you can expect in 2021, and how to optimize your Jamstack e-commerce website for them.

Easy access environment variables, managing environment variables with Netlify Dev

When you need to keep a sensitive variable in a safe place, environment variables can help. With Netlify, you can manage your environment variables centrally in your site’s deploy settings admin, and access them in your local build if you run your site with Netlify Dev.

Open proxy deprecation

As part of our mission to build a better web, Netlify recently deprecated the ability to create open proxies, which can be a vector for abuse. Odds are, you are not impacted. Only a few dozen customers had configured an open proxy, and all have already been contacted directly.

Improved support for big netlify.toml files

While most Netlify sites do not require much configuration, customizing a site’s settings can be quite useful. In some instances, for example for sites with a long list of redirects, users with unusually large netlify.toml files might experience build failures. We have just fixed this problem, bringing full support for netlify.toml files of any size.

Until next time!