Modes

Gustwind implements two modes: development and production. The idea of the development mode is to allow rapid development of your site while the production mode emits the site content in a static HTML to upload to a static file server to host.

Development mode🔗

The development mode of Gustwind has been implemented in a lazy manner. This means the server will boot fast and perform rendering only on request.

The preferred development path is the Node/Vite server through npm run dev or gustwind-node --develop.

Production mode🔗

In the production mode, the tool generates HTML at the ./build directory. The preferred local path is npm run build or gustwind-node --build, while npm run build:release generates the additional Pagefind search index intended for deployment. Compared to the development mode, anything development related is removed from the output.

During tests against a large site with over 2000 pages, the build was completed in a few seconds and so far the performance seems promising although it can be still improved and not a lot of thought has been given to it.

If you have to perform a lot of processing on your data, it's recommended to push it to a third-party API (i.e. a GraphQL) and handle it there. That said, Gustwind lets you do all the processing while its running but that will come with a performance cost unless you cache the processing.