Moving to Cloudflare Pages

This site just moved from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare Pages. Here’s the why and the how.

Why move?

GitHub Pages works fine for basic Jekyll hosting, but Cloudflare Pages gives me a few things I wanted:

• Faster global CDN — Cloudflare’s edge network is hard to beat
• Preview deployments — every PR gets its own URL automatically
• More control — headers, redirects, and eventually Workers if I need server-side logic

The site is still Jekyll with the Chirpy theme, still hosted from a Git repo, still just markdown files. The only thing that changed is where it builds and deploys.

What changed in the repo

Not much, honestly:

1. Removed the GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/pages-deploy.yml)
2. Added a Gemfile.lock — Cloudflare’s build system needs it to install gems
3. Added a .ruby-version file — tells Cloudflare which Ruby to use
4. Updated _config.yml to point at tsarthak.pages.dev instead of tsarthak.github.io
5. Added a justfile for local dev commands (just serve, just build, just new-post)

The Cloudflare setup

In the Cloudflare dashboard: Workers & Pages → Create → Connect to Git → pick the repo. Build settings:

Setting	Value
Build command	bundle exec jekyll build
Output directory	_site

Three environment variables are critical:

• RUBY_VERSION = 3.2.11
• JEKYLL_ENV = production
• BUNDLE_WITHOUT = `` (empty string — without this, Cloudflare skips gems and the build fails silently)

That last one is the only real gotcha.

Local development

just install  # bundle install
just serve    # localhost:4000 with live reload
just build    # production build
just new-post "Some Title"  # scaffolds a new post

Managed by mise for Ruby versioning and just as the command runner. Neither is needed on Cloudflare’s side — they’re local-only tools.

What’s next

Writing things down as I build them. Tech dumps, quick references, and the occasional deep dive.