Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites

I was wondering when this was going to happen! This is a legitimate contender here against Gatsby, Netlify, AWS Amplify and the like<p>One thing I like about this over all the others is they aren’t (to my knowledge) just reselling AWS features with added convenience (not that this is an issue or bad, but this a lot of what Netlify does with their lamdas for instance, if I recall correctly) and their CDN is top notch IMO as well. I’m very excited to see how this plays out especially when they add the full stack backend to the mix with durable object storage and broader more fully features edge workers with KV storage<p>I do wonder if they’ll add GraphQL support out of the box (for instance a ready to configure and use a GQL worker)<p>Also curious if they will solve for the ability for JAMstack sites to have more real time features via SSE or websockets through their worker platform<p>Genuinely excited! Sadly they aren’t hiring for WFH and their SF office didn’t have any postings related to working on this from what I can tell :(<p>I can only dream of working on such cool things

This is probably going to go somewhere, and it&#x27;s good to see Netlify get some more competition, but this announcement kind of lost me at:<p>&gt; There are no great solutions.<p>Therea are plenty of existing solutions here that do pretty much the same thing, including Netlify, Vercel, and going all the way back to Heroku.<p>Cloudflare is expanding their product line, which is fine, but lets not pretend that this is some brand new ground-breaking deployment methodology.

Perfect timing, I was planning on launching a new personal blog next week. Was gonna use GitHub Pages fronted by Cloudflare but this is even better since it has preview and password capabilities.<p>If anybody from Cloudflare is listening I would love to get on the beta asap. Would also be great if you had some ready to go simple, clean blogging templates :)<p>I&#x27;m generally impressed with the direction Cloudflare is moving, they have some really powerful and innovative infrastructure primitives (workers, durable objects) and a killer network. Going to be interesting to see how they take advantage of that as they build out higher level offerings.<p>By the way, if anybody has recommendations for simple, clean, modern looking blog template (something like medium) that they have actually used, I am all ears. So far I have found theses two:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jekyll&#x2F;minima" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jekyll&#x2F;minima</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wowthemesnet&#x2F;mediumish-theme-jekyll&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wowthemesnet&#x2F;mediumish-theme-jekyll&#x2F;</a><p>Minima is a little too minimal and mediumish seems a little muchish, but I don&#x27;t want to spend too much time searching for the perfect theme so unless something else lands at my feet I probably just pick one and start writing.

I understand the need for launching with GitHub integration only, really. It&#x27;s probably 2020 table stakes for launching a hosting platform, ticking the &quot;up and running in 5 minutes&quot; requirement checkbox. (See also: Digital Ocean&#x27;s recently launched App Platform, same situation.)<p>But many of us walked away from GitHub and embraced GitLab in the last few years, probably a big wave in 2018. As far as I can tell, there&#x27;s not a publicly documented non-GitHub way to interact with Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare folks: if you can&#x27;t launch with a full GitLab integration that&#x27;s understandable, but I&#x27;m tired of sitting these things out because they can only launch in simple mode. For my part, I&#x27;d rather fuss around with .gitlab-ci.yml now than start a project on my old GitHub account and deal with unknown migration pains later.

Seems very similar to Netlify, which is a good thing. Commits get their own preview URLs and branches get their own dedicated alias. Had a quick look at their pricing as well and the main difference is the Cloudflare free plan is limited to 500 builds per month as opposed to Netlify&#x27;s 300 build _minutes_ per month and that Cloudflare offer unlimited bandwidth instead of 100GB per month. I am excited to start using this.

Cloudflare is increasingly becoming one of the more interesting companies out there. I feel like they&#x27;re shifting more and more from being a straight up CDN and trying to dip their toes into things that are closer to but not quite exactly IaaS.<p>Kind of like a better developer experience on top of certain AWS services.

Other exciting news from article:<p>&gt; Over the coming months, we’ll be working on integrating Workers and Pages into a seamless experience. It’ll work the exact same way Pages does: just write your code, git push, and we’ll deploy it for you. The only difference is, it won’t just be your frontend, it’ll be your backend, too. And just to be clear: this is not just for stateless functions. With Workers KV and Durable Objects, we see a huge opportunity to really enable any web application to be built on this platform<p>Also:<p>&gt; With Cloudflare Pages, each commit gets its own unique URL. Preview URLs make it easier to get meaningful code reviews without the overhead of pulling down the branch.<p>&gt; each feature branch will have its own dedicated consistent alias, allowing you to have a consistent URL for the latest changes.

I’d love to see a version of this (or Netlify, Vercel, etc) that didn’t bundle CI with the preview and deploy steps so that I can pick my own CI and then effectively use the “CDN” as the highly qualified host of my static assets.

CloudFlare has leveraged the fact that they are pretty close to the sole provider of DDoS (which 99% of people don&#x27;t need to worry about) beautifully.<p>Once your in for the DNS&#x2F;DDoS&#x2F;Nginx-as-a-service adding anything else is a matter of hop&#x2F;latency minimization. Like I love and use Netlify but I&#x27;m always happy to reduce hops where I can.

This is huge!<p>&quot;It’ll work the exact same way Pages does: just write your code, git push, and we’ll deploy it for you. The only difference is, it won’t just be your frontend, it’ll be your backend, too. And just to be clear: this is not just for stateless functions. With Workers KV and Durable Objects, we see a huge opportunity to really enable any web application to be built on this platform.&quot;<p>The three primitives to anything on the internet is<p>1) static assets - just served as is to the client (cf pages&#x2F;cdn) 2) dynamic api - compute per client request (cf workers) 3) a fast and consistent data store - (cf kv &#x2F; objects)<p>The three primitives allow any developer to build powerful serverless services. Plus they have built in analytics and other nice extras.<p>What I want next from cloudflare is being able to run containers like google cloud run, and a nice firestore like database. That would make cloudflare a pretty amazing cloud provider.

Always pleased to see more alternatives to Netlify&#x2F;Vercel. I love how easy Netlify makes it to deploy things, but I don&#x27;t really understand their pricing.<p>I recently built a pretty basic static webapp that would have racked up around £100 in bandwidth charges (~0.5TB) in the first 24 hours on Netlify. I stuck it on BunnyCDN instead after I realised this and it ended up costing around £3. The five or so minutes I save manually running and uploading the build each time is not worth many hundreds of pounds a month.<p>Netlify&#x27;s bandwidth charges seem excessive, but then Vercel and DO App Platform are comparable, so maybe I&#x27;m missing something. I guess CDN companies have an advantage here. I&#x27;d be happy to pay Netlify money for all the sites I host that don&#x27;t use a lot of bandwidth, but they insist in hosting them for free.

If anyone was confused like I was as to what form the beta access page is talking about, it loads a script from Marketo which most any content blocker by default will stop from loading. In my case, I had to toggle off Firefox&#x27;s Enchanced Tracking Protection (and NextDNS... and uBlock Origin...)

What if I already have static HTML and just need a host? No builds (I do them locally), no frameworks, just an HTML structure. I&#x27;d love to just be able to point to a git repo and have the site published through Cloudflare, since it already sits in front of my site anyway.

I built an integration with Netlify that allows users of WeBase to build websites&#x2F;applications with our tool and deploy to Netlify [1].<p>I&#x27;d love to be able to build a similar integration with Cloudflare pages.<p>How cool is it to build with a UI tool and deploy in seconds to global infrastructure?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webase.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;build-with-webase-deploy-to-netlify" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webase.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;build-with-webase-deploy-to-netl...</a>

Psyched to see this shipping! Congrats folks :)

I&#x27;m currently using Netlify for my personal website and it works flawlessly. The only thing that would make me go to Cloudflare is the 500 builds per month, no mentions of build time. While Netlify is limited to 300 minutes of build time per month, in free tier.

I think this is great, and I would love to see the automatic builds with preview urls for commits and branches extended to Cloudflare Workers.<p>They will first need to raise the script limit, which will mean rethinking how worker code is deployed to the edge. If you&#x27;re going to have potentially hundreds of preview versions deployed per script, you can&#x27;t eagerly push it to every server worldwide.<p>But in turn solving that problem and raising that limit will also open up Cloudflare Workers for more potential use cases. Currently if you want to deploy multi-tenant applications with customized per-tenant code on workers you would run out of scripts and need to set each tenant up with their own workers account.

Posting this here hoping someone from Cloudflare sees this. Your team features suck. Impossible to grant access to a single “site” or transfer ownership of a single site. Until you improve that, hard for an agency like ours to use this new Pages feature.<p>Also while your here, youR pricing is a mess across the platform. You have so many add-on extra costs per site and it’s really hard to understand how they interact with the different monthly plans.

Cloudflare: Are you planning on making the Docs pages available on Github? They 404 despite having links:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cloudflare&#x2F;pages-docs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;content&#x2F;how-to&#x2F;deploy-a-gatsby-site.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cloudflare&#x2F;pages-docs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;con...</a><p>My interest is looking at how you do things for the Gatsby node structure.

Yay -- going to spend the holidays porting my personal website over to this.<p>Cloudflare has made it really easy to give them my money.

I think the only reason I pay for GitHub is to have a custom domain. Is Cloudflare offering this for free?

Interesting, just competition for netlify, vercel etc I guess.<p>Weird use of capitalized JAM... it&#x27;s been accepted for a good portion of the year to now be Jamstack I thought.

Has anyone done the calculations on the pricing comparisons for github actions, netlify, vercel, cloudflare etc?

Does Cloudflare Pages support deploying Stackbit static sites?

This is great!<p>But it&#x27;s also one small step along a path that leads to the end of the internet.

What does JAMstack means?

Cloudflare abandoned their previously permissive free speech stance. Are they really a company we want to give more centralized power and market share to? I&#x27;m concerned they may be yet another activist tech company who joins the deplatforming train, and would rather not rely on their products or evangelize them if that&#x27;s the case. Given that they are essentially an Internet utility, I&#x27;d rather see them operate in a content-neutral manner except where the law forces them to take action.

Check their terms.[1]<p>First of all, you&#x27;re giving them a license to your content for their purposes. <i>&quot;By submitting, posting, or publishing your content, suggestions, enhancement requests, recommendations, feedback, information, data, or comments (“Content”) to any Website or Online Service, you are granting Cloudflare a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license (with the right to sublicense) to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works of your Content. You will retain ownership of your Content, however, any use of your Content by Cloudflare may be without any compensation paid to you.&quot;</i> For example, Cloudflare could make a copy of your site and monetize it.<p>Second, you can be cancelled at any time. <i>&quot;We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and&#x2F;or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and&#x2F;or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and&#x2F;or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and&#x2F;or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and&#x2F;or Online Services.&quot;</i> For example, if you were promoting a product that competes with Cloudflare, your site could be taken down with no notice.<p>Those are the big ones. Also, there&#x27;s no uptime guarantee, an overreaching indemnification clause, and the usual &quot;I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further&quot; clause.<p>It&#x27;s about as bad as the Apple App Store.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;website-terms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;website-terms&#x2F;</a>