Cloudflare with Astro

Three things that commonly go wrong.

1. 01

   Redirect order is not alphabetical, and it matters

   A wildcard placed above a specific rule makes that rule unreachable, and nothing warns you: the specific address quietly lands wherever the wildcard points. After a migration this is the failure that sends the six most valuable old URLs to the home page. The list is generated in a deliberate order and then requested, not read.

2. 02

   Not everything an Astro site can do survives on a static host

   Anything wanting a server at request time needs a Worker, and Workers do not offer the whole Node API. A route that works locally can fail on deploy for the want of one module, so which routes need a request is a decision made before the build, not discovered after it.

3. 03

   Scheduled work is the thing people forget

   A static site publishes what it was built with, so a post dated tomorrow appears when something rebuilds. On a host without a scheduler, that something is a person. Worth deciding up front whether a daily rebuild is automated or somebody's job.

What is included.

• The built site served as static assets from the edge

• Redirects from the migration, in the host's own format

• Security and caching headers set per path

• Routes that must run per request, where any exist

• A custom domain, with the apex and www agreeing