Papa Labs

Launch runbook: deploying to Cloudflare Pages and binding papalabs.dev

2 min read #guide#cloudflare#deploy 中文

Once the content is in shape, going live is just this checklist. Same platform as my other Cloudflare Pages projects, except this one is purely static — even simpler.

Cloudflare Pages product page

A static site on Pages: the free tier is more than enough for a personal blog

The better route — every git push deploys automatically:

  1. Push the blog repo to GitHub (private is fine);
  2. Cloudflare Dashboard → Workers & Pages → Create → Pages → Connect to Git, pick the repo;
  3. Build configuration:
SettingValue
Build commandnpm run build
Build output directorydist
Environment variableNODE_VERSION = 22

NODE_VERSION is non-negotiable — the Pages default Node is old, and Astro 5 needs a recent one.

Use npm run build, not astro build: the Pagefind search index generation hangs off that npm script, and running astro directly ships a site with no working search.

Option 2: Direct upload with wrangler

If you’d rather not connect GitHub, build locally and push the folder:

npm run build
npx wrangler pages deploy dist --project-name papalabs-blog

Good for quick previews or before the repo is ready to share.

Binding the domain

  1. Pages project → Custom domains → add papalabs.dev;
  2. If the domain is already on Cloudflare, DNS wires itself up and HTTPS is ready within minutes;
  3. Add www.papalabs.dev too (it 301s to the apex automatically).

Pre-launch checklist

  • site in astro.config.mjs is the production domain (it feeds absolute URLs in RSS and the sitemap);
  • Every unfinished article is marked draft: true;
  • One local npm run build && npm run preview pass — click through search, mindmaps and dark mode;
  • After launch, submit https://papalabs.dev/sitemap-index.xml to Google Search Console.

This is where the static-site bet pays off: no database to migrate, no secrets to configure, no server to babysit. The build output runs anywhere.

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