All posts by Rita Kozlov

Introducing Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites

Post Syndicated from Rita Kozlov original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages/

Introducing Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites

Introducing Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites

Across multiple cultures around the world, this time of year is a time of celebration and sharing of gifts with the people we care the most about. In that spirit, we thought we’d take this time to give back to the developer community that has been so supportive of Cloudflare for the last 10 years.

Today, we’re excited to announce Cloudflare Pages: a fast, secure and free way to build and host your JAMstack sites.

Today, the path from an idea to a website is paved with good intentions

Websites are the way we express ourselves on the web. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hobbyist with a blog, or the largest of corporations with millions of customers — if you want to reach people outside the confines of 140 280 characters, the web is the place to be.

As a frontend developer, it’s your responsibility to bring this expression to life. And make no mistake — with so many frontend frameworks, tooling, and static site generators at your disposal — it’s a great time to be in your line of work.

That is, of course, right up until the point when you’re ready to show your work off to the world. That’s when things can start to get a little hairy.

At this point, continuing to keep things local rather than committing to source starts to become… irresponsible. But then: how do you quickly iterate and maintain momentum? As you change things, you need to make sure those changes don’t get lost — saving them to source control — while keeping in sync with what’s currently deployed to production.

There are no great solutions.

If you’re in a larger organization, you might have a DevOps organization devoted to exactly that: automating deployments using Continuous Integration (CI) tooling.

Most CI tooling, however, is quite cumbersome, and for good reason — to allow organizations to customize their automation, regardless of their stack and setup. But for the purpose of developing a website, it can still feel like an unnecessary and frustrating diversion on the road to delivering your web project. Configuring a .yaml file, adding and removing commands, waiting minutes for each build to run, and praying to the CI gods at each one that these are the right commands. Hopelessly rerunning the same build over and over, and expecting a different result.  

Often, hours are lost. The process stands in the way of you and doing your best work.

Cloudflare Pages: letting frontend devs do what they do best

We think there’s a better way.

With Cloudflare Pages, we set out to simplify every step along the journey by tying deployment to your existing development workflow.

Seamless Git integration, with builds built-in

With Cloudflare Pages, all you have to do is select your repo, and tell us which framework you’re using. We’ll take care of chanting CI incantations on your behalf, while you keep doing what you were already doing: git commit and git push your changes — we’ll build and deploy them for you.

As the project grows, so do the stakes, and the number of collaborators.

For a site in production, changes need to be reviewed thoroughly. As the reviewer, looking at the code, and skimming for red flags only gets you so far. To thoroughly review, you have to commit or git stash your changes, pull down locally, get it running to make sure it actually works — looking at code alone won’t catch everything!

The other developers on the team are not the only stakeholders. There are designers, marketers, PMs who want to provide feedback before the changes go out.

Unique preview URLs

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. They also make it easier to get feedback from PMs, designers and marketers on the latest iteration, bridging the gap between mocks and code.

Infinite staging

“Does anyone mind if I take over staging?” might also sound like a familiar question. With Cloudflare Pages, each feature branch will have its own dedicated consistent alias, allowing you to have a consistent URL for the latest changes.

With Preview and Production environments, all feature branches and preview links will be built with preview variables, so you can experiment without impacting production data.

When you’re ready to deploy to production, we’ll redeploy to production for you with the updated production environment variables.

Collaboration for all

Collaboration is the key to building amazing websites and products — the more the merrier! As a security company, we definitely don’t want you sharing password and credentials. Which is why we provide multi user access for free for unlimited users — invite all your friends, on us!

Modern sites with modern standards

We all know premature optimization is a cardinal sin, but once your project is in front of customers you want to have the best performance possible. If it’s successful, you also want it to be available!

Today, this is time you have to spend optimizing performance (chasing those 100 lighthouse scores), and scaling, from a few to millions of users.

Luckily, we happen to know a thing or two about running a global network of 200 data centers though, so we’ve got you covered.

With Pages, your site is deployed directly to our edge, milliseconds away from customers, and at global scale.

The latest web standards are fun to read about on Hacker News but not fun to implement yourself. With Cloudflare Pages, we’ll do the heavy lifting to keep you ahead of the curve: IPv6, HTTP/3, TLS 1.3, all the latest image formats.

Oh, and one more thing

We’re really excited for developers and their teams to use Cloudflare Pages to collaborate on the best static sites together. There’s just one thing that didn’t sit quite right with us: why stop at static sites?

What if we could make building full-blown, dynamic applications just as easy?

Although APIs are a core part of the JAMstack, today that refers primarily to the robust API economy developers have access to. And while that’s great, it’s not always enough. If you want to build your own APIs, and store user or application data, you need more than third party APIs. What to do, though?

Well, this is the point at which it’s mighty helpful we’ve already built a global serverless platform: Cloudflare Workers. Workers allows frontend developers to easily write scalable backends to their applications in the same language as the frontend, JavaScript.

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.

We’re super excited about the future of Pages, and how with the power of Cloudflare Workers behind it, it represents a bold vision for how new applications are going to be built on the web.

But you know the thing about gifts? They’re no good without someone to receive them. We’d love for you to sign up for our beta and try out Cloudflare Pages!

PS: we’re hiring!

Want to help us shape the future of development on the web? Join our team.

Announcing wrangler dev — the Edge on localhost

Post Syndicated from Rita Kozlov original https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-wrangler-dev-the-edge-on-localhost/

Announcing wrangler dev — the Edge on localhost

Cloudflare Workers — our serverless platform — allows developers around the world to run their applications from our network of 200 datacenters, as close as possible to their users.

A few weeks ago we announced a release candidate for wrangler dev — today, we’re excited to take wrangler dev, the world’s first edge-based development environment, to GA with the release of wrangler 1.11.

Think locally, develop globally

It was once assumed that to successfully run an application on the web, one had to go and acquire a server, set it up (in a data center that hopefully you had access to), and then maintain it on an ongoing basis. Luckily for most of us, that assumption was challenged with the emergence of the cloud. The cloud was always assumed to be centralized — large data centers in a single region (“us-east-1”), reserved for compute. The edge? That was for caching static content.

Again, assumptions are being challenged.

Cloudflare Workers is about moving compute from a centralized location to the edge. And it makes sense: if users are distributed all over the globe, why should all of them be routed to us-east-1, on the opposite side of the world, causing latency and degrading user experience?

But challenging one assumption caused others to come into view. One of the most obvious ones was: would a local development environment actually provide the best experience for someone looking to test their Worker code? Trying to fit the entire Cloudflare edge, with all its dependencies onto a developer’s machine didn’t seem to be the best approach. Especially given that the place the developer was going to run that code in production was mere milliseconds away from the computer they were running on.

When I was in college, getting started with programming, one of the biggest barriers to entry was installing all the dependencies required to run a single library. I would go as far as to say that the third, and often forgotten hardest problem in computer science is dependency management.

We’ve not the first to try and unify development environments across machines — tools such as Docker aim to solve this exact problem by providing a prepackaged development environment.

Yet, packaging up the Workers runtime is not quite so simple.

Beyond the Workers runtime, there are many components that make up Cloudflare’s edge, including DNS resolution, the Cloudflare cache — all of those parts are what makes Cloudflare Workers so powerful. That means that without those components, a standalone runtime is insufficient to represent the behavior of Worker request handling. The reason to develop locally first is to have the opportunity to experiment without affecting production. Thus, having a local development environment that truly reflects production is a requirement.

wrangler dev

wrangler dev provides all the convenience of a local development environment, without the headache of trying to reproduce the reality of production locally — and then having to keep the two environments in sync.

By running at the edge, it provides a high fidelity, consistent experience for all developers, without sacrificing the speedy feedback loop of a local development environment.

Live reloading

Announcing wrangler dev — the Edge on localhost

As you update your code, wrangler dev will detect changes, and push the new version of your code to the edge.

console.log() at your fingertips

Announcing wrangler dev — the Edge on localhost

Previously to extract your console logs from the Workers runtime, you had to have the Workers Preview open in a browser window at all times. With wrangler dev, you can receive your own logs, directly to your terminal of choice.

Cache API, KV, and more!

Since wrangler dev runs on the edge, you can now easily test the state of a cache.put(), without having to deploy your Worker to production.

wrangler dev will spin up a new KV namespace for development, so you don’t have to worry about affecting your production data.

And if you’re looking to test out some of the features provided on request.cf that provide rich information about the request such as geo-location — they will all be provided from the Cloudflare data center.

Get started

wrangler dev is now available in the latest version of Wrangler, the official Cloudflare Workers CLI.

To get started, follow our installation instructions here.

What’s next?

wrangler dev is just our first foray into giving our developers more visibility and agility with their development process.

We recognize that we have a lot more work to do to meet our developers needs, including providing an easy testing framework for Workers, and allowing our customers to observe their Workers’ behavior in production.

Just as wrangler dev provides a quick feedback loop between our developers and their code, we love to have a tight feedback loop between our developers and our product. We love to hear what you’re building, how you’re building it, and how we can help you build it better.