Static-export deploy

Context

The old site already deployed the way I wanted: push to main, Netlify builds, a static bundle goes live. The rebuild had to keep that shape. The risk on a framework migration is that you accidentally turn a content swap into a host migration, or quietly take on server infrastructure you then have to own forever.

Next.js gives you a choice here. You can run it as a server with SSR and serverless functions, or you can export it as a pure static site. That was the decision to make.

Decision

I went with pure static export (output: 'export'). Everything resolves at build time and the output is a folder of static files, with no server runtime in production at all.

// next.config
const nextConfig = {
  output: 'export',
};

That one line is load-bearing. It means no SSR, no incremental regeneration, no API routes or middleware at runtime. Every page is prerendered to HTML and shipped as-is.

For a CV site, a server you have to keep alive is a liability, not a feature. The less infrastructure I own, the less there is to break at 2am.

Consequences

The deploy stayed identical to the old one, so cutover was a content swap rather than a pipeline rebuild. The trade-off is that static export disables Next's built-in image optimiser, which forced a follow-on decision about how to serve optimised images with no backend.

It also set a hard constraint for everything built afterwards, including this Backroom: any content rendering has to happen at build time. That directly shaped the markdown pipeline decision, which renders and highlights every doc before deploy rather than at runtime.

Rejected alternatives

Netlify's Next.js runtime, with SSR and functions, was the alternative. I rejected it. It adds a serverless surface area this site has no need for and complicates a like-for-like cutover, all to support features a static CV site never uses.

Status / trail

Accepted and in force. Every route exports as static HTML, verified at build with no serverless functions emitted. The image-serving consequence is resolved in the image loader decision.