Included with Federalist

• An automatic deployment mechanism for static site assets and supported site engines.
• Web-based configuration and access to preview builds.
• 18F’s work to complete and maintain an agency Authority to Operate (ATO) for Federalist’s hosting, leveraging the cloud.gov System Security Plan (SSP), with a short process to add new sites to the ATO documentation.
• Premade templates for your sites, in addition to the many sites you can copy in creating your site. All templates now have Netlify CMS support built in, allowing content creators to make site changes without requiring extensive html, CSS, or YAML experience.
• Easy on-boarding or off-boarding: Federalist can deploy content from existing GitHub repositories used with other tools. Your Federalist site will also be easy to port to another deployment mechanism if that’s ever needed.
• Content delivery network support for your desired URL, with custom 404 page (see customization).
• A user community across agencies and vendors using Federalist.
• A permanent team to maintain and patch Federalist as needed.
• GSA’s previous work to build cloud.gov, a robust and secure platform as a service, recognized with a FedRAMP Moderate (DISA Level 2) PATO, that ensures Federalist’s underlying technology is secure, performant, and scalable.

Not included with Federalist

Large file hosting

GitHub isn’t generally set up to host more than a gigabyte of file content and Federalist’s build container can’t accommodate extremely large repositories in the build process. Instead, you should store very large files separately and link to them from your Federalist site.

Code editing tools

While it is possible to edit files directly in Github, in practice, this is cumbersome and limited. A local development environment will improve your efficiency when editing code, provide faster feedback for frequent changes, and enable a better debugging experience. Static site engines, such as Jekyll or Node-based tools, require you to have a local environment to ensure that the dependencies of your project are managed properly.