We started with a motto of making website deployment easy for everyone. In our first release, we started with a simple drag and drop so that each and everyone can deploy a static website quickly. Feedbacks from customers were tremendous, and many were asking for the ability to deploy a website from their development workflow.

Today we are excited to announce the release of Clodui CLI(command-line interface), integrate this tool with your continuous integration(CI) or continuous delivery(CD) pipeline to deploy your Clodui websites.

At the same time, we are continuously improving our platform, and recently we rolled out a few changes to improve the performance of your website.

Clodui CLI

Using a web interface is easy, but when it comes to automating tasks web interface is not the right choice. For automating tasks, we need command-line tools. Clodui CLI is such a tool that you can use from your terminal.

Clodui CLI requires NodeJS v10.x or above. To install CLI run following command

npm install @clodui/cli -g
or
yarn global add @clodui/cli

Clodui CLI commands needs credentials; here are the options available to set credentials.

• set --username and --password parameters with each command
• set environment variables CLODUI_USERNAME, CLODUI_PASSWORD, then no need to pass credentials with each command.
• run login command first; once you log in, then you don't need to pass credentials again for the subsequent commands.

Now you can create a website or deploy changes from your terminal. Even integrate it with your code deployment pipeline.

The screen recording below shows Clodui CLI in action.

You can read more about the available commands from docs.

Support for Brotli compression

We have added support for Brotli in addition to GZIP compression. Brotli compression is better than GZIP and reduces file size, which improves website performance.

Brotli is a lossless compression algorithm introduced by Google in the year 2015 it provides better compression than GZIP.

A study from Akamai showed that Brotli compression performed better than GZIP. They analyzed top 1000 URLs on the web and found out that Brotli improvements over GZIP against different file types as below.

All the modern browsers now support Brotli, caniuse shows support is available in 93.17% of the browsers.

Clodui uses Accept-Encoding HTTP request header and decides which compression to use. When a user is visiting your website from the browser which doesn't support Brotli, we deliver the response in GZIP format. If the user's browser supports both compressions (GZIP and Brotli), then we deliver the response in Brotli format.

Note: This feature is only available for newly deployed websites. To avail this feature in your website, please do a new deployment or you can re-deploy your existing website by clicking on the "re-deploy with latest settings" button against the deployment.

Improved page load time

We made a few changes to our caching logic; our testing has shown that these changes improved websites speed by 20-30%.

Clodui set the cache header to max-age=0 for all the HTML files for achieving instant invalidation. Due to this, previously our CDN servers had to check for a new version of HTML file with origin server every time a page is requested. Check with origin server was happening even if there is no new deployment(Clodui deployments are atomic, i.e. file is changed only after a new deployment), this overhead affected websites FTTB(First Time to Byte).

Now with the new changes, CDN servers won't check for a new version with origin server unless there is a new deployment. This change reduces FTTB and improves your website speed.

Share your feedback

As always we are happy to hear your feedback so we can improve Clodui. Please drop an email to support@clodui.com or send us a message through our chat support.