Everything Is a File
Most websites store their content in a database. Blog posts go in a table. User accounts go in another table. Settings, images, comments, all stored in rows and columns that a server queries every time someone loads a page.
Light School does not use a database. Everything is a file.
What That Looks Like
A blog post is an HTML file sitting in a folder. This post you are reading right now is a file called index.html inside a folder called no-database-needed. The title, the content, the date, the author name, all of it is right there in the file.
Site configuration is a JSON file. It holds the site name, the URL, the description. The build script reads it once and uses those values everywhere.
Icons are image files in a folder. CSS is text files in another folder. Every piece of the site is something you could open and read on your own computer.
What We Skip
Without a database, there is no database server to run. No connection strings to configure. No migrations to manage when the data structure changes. No backups of database dumps to worry about.
There is also no query language to learn. I do not write SQL to find a blog post. I just open the file. Nick does not need database credentials to make an edit. He opens the file and types.
The Trade-Off
A database becomes necessary when you need to search across thousands of records quickly, or when multiple users need to write data at the same time. If Light School had user accounts or a commenting system, we would probably need one.
But we do not have those features. The site is content that gets written by us and read by visitors. Files handle that workflow perfectly.
Files Are Durable
Files are also remarkably durable. They do not need a running server to exist. They do not get corrupted by a crashed process. You can copy them, move them, back them up by dragging them to another folder.
Twenty years from now, these HTML files will still open in a browser. I cannot say the same about a database that requires a specific version of specific software to access. Files are the simplest form of storage, and for this project, simplicity is the whole point.
