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How to deploy your site to Cloudflare pages

Luciano photo, a person with short hair and glasses By: Luciano Hillcoat
Feb 6, 2023 - 10 minutes read.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Cloudflare nor they sponsor me. This article is for sharing information that I find useful.

🧑‍💻 This post assumes you have intermediate experience with the command line and Git front-ends like GitHub.

When looking for a hosting solution for a static website that has a free tier, there are many options including Github Pages, Neocities, and Codeberg Pages

Cloudflare Pages has a free tier that is pretty permissive, at the time of writing they offer:

💡 You can read about its limits on this site

Let’s start

Black and silver laptop computer on a table

Photo by Clément Hélardot on Unsplash

First, go ahead and create an account on Cloudflare if you don’t have one.

We are gonna use GitHub, to take advantage of their CI/CD platform.

Let’s create a new repository:

Screenshot from Github showing the create dropdown menu, the mouse cursor is highlighting the New repository button

You can name it whatever you want! You are free to choose private or public repo too.

Screenshot from Github showing the create repo page. The name of the repo is typed as my-website. Bellow, there is a description box that says: Hopefully, you will have a better name for it

Go ahead and copy the clone URL that is shown on top of the screen.

Open your favorite terminal emulator, and clone it:

🪟 For the Windows operative system, please continue on WSL. If you don’t have it, go ahead and install it and configure it.

Shell 
git clone git@github.com:lucrnz/my-website.git my-website
cd my-website/

Now we have to log in to Cloudflare or create an account by using their command line tool.

For this, you will need Node installed on your computer.

Shell 
npx wrangler login

This will show you an URL that you have to copy and paste into your web browser to continue the login, there you can create your Cloudflare account if you don’t have one.

Writing the code

We are going to create an example website to deploy, additionally, we are gonna use SCSS to show off in our automatic deployment.

✏️ Let’s create our starting files:

Shell 
touch .gitignore
touch index.html
touch style.scss

Edit the index.html file with the following contents:

index.html 
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <title>My Awesome Website</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
    <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com" />
    <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin />
    <link
      href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Mulish:wght@700&family=Poppins:wght@300;400&display=swap"
      rel="stylesheet"
    />
    <link
      rel="stylesheet"
      href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.2.1/css/all.min.css"
      integrity="sha512-MV7K8+y+gLIBoVD59lQIYicR65iaqukzvf/nwasF0nqhPay5w/9lJmVM2hMDcnK1OnMGCdVK+iQrJ7lzPJQd1w=="
      crossorigin="anonymous"
      referrerpolicy="no-referrer"
    />
  </head>
  <body>
    <header>
      <nav role="navigation">
        <a href="#home">Home</a>
        <a href="#projects">Projects</a>
        <a href="#about">About</a>
        <a href="#contact">Contact</a>
        <a class="hamburger" href="#"><i class="fas fa-bars"></i></a>
      </nav>
    </header>
    <section class="hero">
      <div>
        <img
          src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1502481851512-e9e2529bfbf9?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&dl=eberhard-grossgasteiger-cs0sK0gzqCU-unsplash.jpg&w=1920&q=80&fm=jpg&crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb"
          alt="Sky and clouds"
        />
        <div class="fill">
          <div class="text">
            <img
              class="icon"
              src="https://www.fakepersongenerator.com/Face/male/male20161083878395203.jpg"
              alt="A photo of David"
            />
            <h2 class="title gradient-text">David Balke</h2>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </section>

    <section id="about" class="container">
      <div class="wrapper">
        <div class="content-left">
          <h2>About me</h2>
          <p>
            Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis
            condimentum ante quis ultricies malesuada. Sed convallis massa eget
            sapien consectetur lacinia. Nam nisl nunc, congue malesuada
            fermentum eu, egestas non ligula. Mauris sit amet augue at tortor
            cursus posuere in sit amet risus. Duis quis venenatis eros, nec
            suscipit turpis.
          </p>
        </div>
        <div class="content-right">
          <img
            src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1457530378978-8bac673b8062?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&dl=francesco-gallarotti-ruQHpukrN7c-unsplash.jpg&w=1920&q=80&fm=jpg&crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb"
            alt="Plants"
          />
        </div>
      </div>
    </section>

    <footer>
      <div class="container">
        <p>Copyright © 2023 Hero Layout Website</p>
        <ul class="social-links">
          <li>
            <a href="#"><i class="fab fa-mastodon"></i></a>
          </li>
          <li>
            <a href="#"><i class="fab fa-instagram"></i></a>
          </li>
          <li>
            <a href="#"><i class="fab fa-twitter"></i></a>
          </li>
        </ul>
      </div>
    </footer>
  </body>
</html>

💅 Let’s now give it a stylesheet, edit the file style.scss

style.scss 
$border-radius: 8px;

:root {
  font-family: "Poppins", sans-serif;
}

h1,
h2 {
  font-family: "Mulish", sans-serif;
}

h1 {
  font-size: 3.5rem;
}

h2 {
  font-size: 2.6rem;
}

header {
  &:after {
    content: ".";
    display: block;
    height: 0;
    clear: both;
    visibility: hidden;
  }

  nav {
    float: right;
    display: flex;
    flex-direction: row;
    gap: 8px;
    justify-content: space-between;
    padding: 10px 20px;

    .hamburger {
      display: none;
      @media (max-width: 768px) {
        display: block;
      }
    }

    a {
      font-size: 20px;
      color: scale-color($color: #333, $lightness: 25%);
      text-decoration: none;
      font-size: 18px;
      padding: 10px 20px;

      &:hover {
        color: #333;
      }

      &:not(:last-child) {
        @media (max-width: 768px) {
          display: none;
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

.hero {
  position: relative;
  padding: 5px;
  height: 350px;

  @media (min-width: 1200px) {
    padding: 40px;
  }

  & > div {
    position: relative;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;

    & > img {
      border-radius: $border-radius;
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
      object-fit: cover;
    }

    .fill {
      position: absolute;
      top: 0;
      left: 0;
      right: 0;
      bottom: 0;
      background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15);
      display: flex;
      justify-content: center;
      align-items: center;

      img.icon {
        width: 128px;
        height: 128px;
        border-radius: 50%;
      }

      & > .text {
        display: flex;
        flex-direction: row;
        gap: 20px;
      }

      .text h2 {
        color: #fff;
      }
    }
  }
}

.container {
  padding: 40px;

  & > .wrapper {
    display: flex;
    flex-direction: column;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: space-around;
    text-align: center;

    @media (min-width: 1200px) {
      flex-direction: row;
    }

    .content-left {
      max-width: 560px;
    }

    .content-right img {
      max-height: 350px;
      border-radius: $border-radius;
    }
  }
}

footer {
  border-radius: $border-radius;
  background-color: #333;
  color: white;
  text-align: center;

  .container {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: space-between;
    align-items: center;
    max-width: 1100px;
    margin: 0 auto;

    .social-links a {
      color: white;
      font-size: 1.5rem;
    }

    .social-links {
      list-style: none;
      margin: 0;
      padding: 0;
      display: flex;

      li {
        margin: 0 10px;
      }
    }
  }
}

💡 This code defines a simple personal website that is about a fake person. You can replace the text if you want. The website uses a layout known as “hero” which is a large image at the top of the page. The image is responsive and will adapt to the size of the screen.

Let’s now compile the stylesheet, and run the following command:

Shell 
npx sass style.scss style.css

You can also use the --watch option to automatically recompile the stylesheet when you edit the file.

Shell 
npx sass --watch style.scss style.css

For being able to preview the website, we will use Python’s built-in HTTP server.

Shell 
python -m http.server

You can now open the website at http://localhost:8000

It should look like this:

Screenshot of the website

Taking care of the deployment

🧰 Let’s create a simple script that takes care of building the website.

Shell 
mkdir -p scripts && \
touch scripts/build.sh

Edit the file scripts/build.sh:

build.sh 
mkdir -p dist && \
npx sass style.scss dist/style.css && \
cp index.html dist/index.html

For making git ignore any built files, edit the file .gitignore:

.gitignore 
# Ignore dist folder
dist/

# Style is managed via sass
style.css

# Ignore css maps
*.css.map

We will commit the changes to git.

Shell 
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Let’s create a new Cloudflare pages project.

Shell 
npx wrangler pages project create my-website

Now we only need to tell Cloudflare Pages to run this script when deploying the website.

For this let’s create our GitHub Actions workflow.

Shell 
mkdir -p .github/workflows
touch .github/workflows/build.yml

Edit the file .github/workflows/build.yml:

build.yml 
name: Build and deploy

on:
  push:
    branches: ["main"]

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        node-version: [20]

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Set up Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
          cache: 'npm'

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm ci

      - name: Build project
        run: bash scripts/build.sh

      - name: Deploy to Cloudflare Pages
        run: npx wrangler pages deploy . --project-name=my-website
        env:
          CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN }}
        working-directory: dist

⚠️ Don’t forget to replace my-website with the name of your website, this is shown in your Cloudflare Pages dashboard.

Before we can deploy the website, we need to create a secret that contains the API token for Cloudflare Pages.

Go to the Cloudflare API Tokens page and create a new token with the following permissions:

In the section called Account Resources, select the account that you want to deploy to.

Screenshot of the create custom token button

Screenshot of the permissions

Now that you have created the token, go to the Github secrets page:

Screenshot of the secrets tabs

Screenshot of the new secret button

Name it CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN and paste the token you created earlier.

Click the Add secret button.

Now we will push the code to GitHub and let GitHub Actions do the rest.

Shell 
git add .
git commit -m "Add GitHub actions workflow"
git push origin main

Conclusion

Open GitHub Actions to see the workflow running, it should take a few minutes to deploy the website.

Screenshot of the Github Actions workflow

💡 To avoid hitting the free build limit, you can make changes to the website in a new branch and then merge it to the main branch when you are done developing those changes.

🎉 Congratulations, you have successfully deployed your website to Cloudflare Pages!

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