As regular readers of this blog will already know, I’m a big fan of the work being done at Cloudflare. So it should be no surprise that I recently sat down to switch the hosting of this blog from Cloudflare Workers to Cloudflare Pages.

Cloudflare Pages is the no-nonsense JAMstack platform from Cloudflare. The switch brings the following benefits to me:

  • No need to maintain Docker images for hugo and wrangler
  • No need to use GitLab CI to build, and then deploy the site
  • No need to maintain the worker for the site
  • Preview sites for each branch/commit

Pages connects directly to your git repository of choice, mine is GitLab, and will do the build in their own CI/CD environment. Cloudflare gets to keep the tools up-to-date, meaning less work for me!

It may well bring many more benefits if you are using another solution, eg:

  • Free hosting
  • Lightening fast performance
  • Analytics with Core Web Vitals

Creating the Pages site

Enough pre-amble, onto the process for switching:

  1. Created a new Pages site and connected it to the correct repo hosted on GitLab
  2. I chose the project name sigma957, so the site will be hosted at https://sigma957.pages.dev
  3. Left the production branch as the default (note to self to rename my production branch to be more in line with current industry trends)
  4. Selected Hugo as the “Framework preset”
  5. Update the “Build Command” so that preview sites build correctly (see Deploy a Hugo site)
hugo -b $CF_PAGES_URL

  1. Lastly add an environment variable HUGO_VERSION with the version you want to use. I’m using 0.111.3 as of the time of writing. I could not find any Cloudflare documentation for which version they use by default, or when they bump it, but for sure I needed a newer version for the theme I picked.

    I plan to bump this environment variable when newer versions of Hugo are released.

Removing the Worker

To date, the site has been hosted on a Cloudflare Worker. This custom worker is no longer necessary as Cloudflare will handle this internally. I believe Pages is running on Workers under the hood, so there is no net difference.

Cloudflare has a document Migrating from Workers Sites to Pages which I used whilst writing the instructions below.

  1. Use the Cloudflare “Add a custom domain” wizard
  2. On the “Configure DNS” page note the existing dummy DNS record for the Worker is being switched to the CNAME: Confirm new DNS record
  3. On the Cloudflare Dashboard for “sigma957.net” > “Worker Routes” remove the route to the worker: Remove worker route
  4. Remove the following files/directories from the project:
    • .dockerignore & Dockerfile used as part of the previous build pipeline
    • .gitlab-ci.yml used to configure GitLab CI
    • worker-site and wrangler.toml used to deploy the Cloudflare Worker
  5. Environment variables in GitLab CI (“Settings” > “CI/CD”)
  6. Remove the worker itself from the account level under “Workers”