With Pages, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the developer experience. One of the areas we are keen to focus on is removing any barriers to entry for our users regardless of their use case or existing set up. Pages is an all-in-one solution with an automated Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline to help you build and deploy your site with one commit to your projects’ repositories hosted on GitHub or GitLab.
However, we realize that this excluded repositories that used a source control provider that Pages didn’t yet support and required varying build complexities. Even though Pages continues to build first-class integrations – for example, we added GitLab support in November 2021 – there are numerous providers to choose from, some of which use `git` alternatives like SVN or Mercurial for their version control systems. It’s also common for larger companies to self-host their project repositories, guarded by a mix of custom authentication and/or proxy protocols.
Pages needed a solution that worked regardless of the repository’s source location and accommodate build project’s complexity. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Pages now supports direct uploads to give you more power to build and iterate how you want and with the tools you want.
What are direct uploads?
Direct uploads enable you to push your build artifacts directly to Pages, side-stepping the automatic, done-for-you CI pipeline that Pages provides for GitHub and GitLab repositories. This means that connecting a Pages project to a git repository is optional. In fact, using git or any version control system is optional!
Today, you can bring your assets directly to Pages by dragging and dropping them into our dashboard or pushing them through Wrangler CLI. You also have the power to use your own CI tool whether that’s something like GitHub Actions or CircleCI to handle your build. Taking your output directory you can bring these files directly to Pages to create a new project and all subsequent deployments after that. Every deployment will be distributed right to the Cloudflare network within seconds.
How does it work?
After using your preferred CI tooling outside of Pages, there are two ways to bring your pre-built assets and create a project with the direct uploads feature:
- Use the Wrangler CLI
- Drag and drop them into the Pages interface
Wrangler CLI
With an estimated 43k weekly Wrangler downloads, you too can use it to iterate quickly on your Pages projects right through the command line. With Wrangler (now with brand-new updates!), you can both create your project and new deployments with a single command.
After Wrangler is installed and authenticated with your Cloudflare account, you can execute the following command to get your site up and running:
npx wrangler pages publish <directory>
Integration with Wrangler provides not only a great way to publish changes in a fast and consecutive manner, but also enables a seamless workflow between CI tooling for building right to Pages for deployment. Check out our tutorials on using CircleCI and GitHub Actions with Pages!
Drag and drop
However, we realize that sometimes you just want to get your site deployed instantaneously without any additional set up or installations. In fact, getting started with Pages shouldn’t have to require extensive configuration. The drag and drop feature allows you to take your pre-built assets and virtually drag them onto the Pages UI. With either a zip file or a single folder of assets, you can watch your project deploy in just a few short seconds straight to the 270+ cities in our network.
What can you build?
With this ease of deploying projects, the possibilities of what you can build are still endless. You can enjoy the fruits of Pages in a project created with direct uploads including but not limited to unique preview URLs, integration with Workers, Access and Web Analytics, and custom redirects/headers.
In thinking about your developer setup, direct uploads provide the flexibility to build the way you want such as:
- Designing and building your own CI workflow
- Utilizing the CI tooling of your choice
- Accommodating complex monorepo structures
- Implementing custom CI logic for your builds.
Migrating from Workers Sites
We’ll have to admit, the idea of publishing assets directly to our network came from a sister product to Pages called Workers Sites and the resemblance is striking! However, Pages affords many feature enhancements to the developer experience that show as a pain point on Workers Sites.
With Pages direct uploads, you can enjoy the freedom and flexibility of customizing your workflow that Workers Sites provides while including an interface to track and share changes and manage production/preview environments. Check out our tutorial on how to migrate over from Workers Sites.
This release immediately unlocks a broad range of use cases, allowing the most basic of projects to the most advanced to start deploying their websites to Pages today. Refer to our developer documentation for more technical details. As always, head over to the Cloudflare Developers Discord server and let us know what you think in the #direct-uploads-beta channel.
Join us at Cloudflare Connect!
Calling all New York City developers! If you’re interested in learning more about Cloudflare Pages, join us for a series of workshops on how to build a full stack application on Thursday, May 12th. Follow along with demonstrations of using Pages alongside other products like Workers, Images and Cloudflare Gateway, and hear directly from our product managers. Register now!