Anyone know how to go about programmatically publishing web pages?

When you say programmatically publish a web page for each user, do you mean an actual page such as each user getting their own URL on your domain? (for example https://www.indiehackers.com/harlanzw)

Or do you mean that each user would then get their own website programmatically? (i.e harlanzw.com)

Also to clarify, are you looking for a no-code solution or are you comfortable with technical recommendations?

I faced this recently and you have a couple of options.

• Do you want dynamic or static sites?
• Do you need custom domains with https?

My first hunch was to use Vercel and serve content with their cloud functions but they have a soft limit of 50 domains per project. I reached their enterprise sales and they offered me to pay $24 per year per extra domain which I think it's a bit absurd.

If you are versed in AWS you could create S3 static sites dynamically with their API and also configure DNS and certificate creation. You need to be kind of an expert with AWS to make this work and your users will need to understand content will not be published instantly.

I also experimented using Cloudflare Workers which are great for serving dynamic and static content. Unfortunately to make a domain work with CF it needs to be added to your CF account as a new zone so that workers respond to that domain and you get SSL. They also have an SSL for SaaS offering which solves these issues but it is only available for enterprise customers (I think it starts at $5K per month).

After months of trying to figure this out, I ended up using Fly.io with a simple Node server that checks the domain and renders content based on that. You users can point their domains using A AAAA CNAME records and they give you an API to create certificates. Each certificate costs $0.1 per month which is very reasonable.

Simple explanation: you don't normally publish a page for each user, you have a single page (eg. /profile) that dynamically shows different data for each user (eg. profile/rasreee).

So the profile page itself will be responsible for loading and displaying the data for each distinct user. Now, how this loading and displaying is implemented depends on the solution you go for, how different the data is for each user and where does this data come from.

At a high level I end up going for the easiest solution possible (at the time). This is what I do - until I have to tweak it for more performant scenarios or move to non html pages.

1. Create the template you want
2. On saving the template (and variable outputs) I dump the template file stream to a CDN as rasreespage.htmlfor example
3. Then I trigger/automate adding a DNS entry that allows the CDN to accept http requests from any specified domain name (and even domain name paths) and points it to my html page.

This works for me because I NEVER want to spin up a VM, containers or mess with traditional web page hosting. The CDN can route to any specific page based on my rules engine (which I can also program/automate) with a trigger of some sort.

I use other scenarios when the pages are non-html such as XML or JSON.

I think this is a pretty simple project and you can do it with basic web tools.

As noted elsewhere I'd say your first decision is the URL structure. Assuming it's www.example.com/user (definitely the ideal), the next decision is static or dynamic? Static is easier than dynamic in so many ways that I think you should just go with static. Any dynamic elements you can probably do with JS. You can generate the site using a template.

You don't need a database to do this.

The way I'd approach this is for the server side to just generate HTML files in a basic filesystem. You could store the user data alongside the HTML in the filesystem.

For example, assuming the user "doctoreval" you would store the JSON in ./doctoreval/index.json and create HTML in ./doctoreval/index.html and (assuming all the data in the JSON file is public).

Then, all you need to do is push the filesystem out to a service like netlify and you're done.

I haven't done this myself, but services like Netlify might have APIs to directly upload HTML without the need for a filesystem, which would be even easier.

Same questions as @harlanzw. Happy to comment further when there's a bit more context as to what you're trying to achieve.

Interestingly enough, I've been thinking about this very problem! You'll need to use some sort of templating system. Looks like bubble would serve your needs https://bubble.io/. If that doesn't work out for you, I'd love to hear about the pain points you ran into.