ente/web/docs/deploy-new.md

Deploying

The various web apps and static sites in this repository are deployed on Cloudflare Pages. This document describes details of how things were setup, and how deployments happen on changes.

The summary of what happens is:

• docs/ get deployed to help.ente.io whenever something that changes docs/ gets merged to main.

You likely don't need to know the rest of the details (until you do, but you can read on then).

First time preparation

Create a new Pages project in Cloudflare, setting it up to use Direct Upload.

Note

Direct upload doesn't work for existing projects tied to your repository using the Git integration.

If you want to keep the pages.dev domain from an existing project, you should be able to delete your existing project and recreate it (assuming no one claims the domain in the middle). I've not seen this documented anywhere, but it worked when I tried, and it seems to have worked for other people too.

There are two ways to create a new project, using Wrangler [1] or using the Cloudflare dashboard [2]. Since this is one time thing, the second option might be easier.

The remaining steps are documented in Cloudflare's guide for using Direct Upload with CI. As a checklist,

• Generate CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN
• Add CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID and CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN to the GitHub secrets
• Add your workflow. e.g. see docs-deploy.yml.

This is the basic setup, and should already work.

Deploying multiple sites

However, we wish to deploy multiple sites from this same repository, so the standard Cloudflare conception of a single "production" branch doesn't work for us.

Instead, we tie each deployment to a branch name. Note that we don't have to actually create the branch or push to it, this branch name is just used as the the branch parameter that gets passed to cloudflare/pages-action.

Since our root pages project is ente.pages.dev, so a branch named foo would be available at foo.ente.pages.dev.

Finally, we create CNAME aliases using a Custom Domain in Cloudflare to point to these deployments from our user facing DNS names.

As a concrete example, the GitHub workflow that deploys docs/ passes "help" as the branch name. The resulting deployment is available at "help.ente.pages.dev". Finally, we add a custom domain to point to it from help.ente.io.