A free Khalid blog on Cloudflare

Cloudflare can build your blog from GitHub and serve it to readers around the world for free. There are two ways in. The button does every step for you. The Pages steps follow the classic GitHub and Cloudflare Pages guide, for people who like to see each setting.

Both start from deploy/cloudflare/ in this repository: a small, ready blog with a welcome post, an about page and an author, in Khalid's classic template. On each build, Cloudflare installs one pinned Khalid release, checks the download against the release's checksums, and runs khalid build. The pages land in public/, and Cloudflare serves that folder as plain files.

The blog runs in static mode: Cloudflare serves files, and nothing of Khalid keeps running. You write by changing the text files in your GitHub repository, and every change you push builds the blog again. The admin, comments, forms and the newsletter need a running server; docs/deploy.md shows the hosts for that.

The button

1. Select the button. Sign in to Cloudflare, or make a free account.
2. Connect your GitHub or GitLab account when Cloudflare asks. Cloudflare copies the starter folder into a new repository in your account, and that repository is your blog from now on. Only the folder is copied, not the whole Khalid project.
3. On the setup page, pick a name for the repository and for the Worker. The Worker is Cloudflare's name for the project that serves the blog, and its name becomes part of the address. Leave the build command as npm run build and the deploy command as npx wrangler deploy.
4. Select Create and deploy. The first build takes a minute or two.

The blog is then at https://<the Worker's name>.<your account's subdomain>.workers.dev. Cloudflare shows the address when the deploy ends.

Cloudflare Pages, step by step

1. On GitHub, fork thebigasif/khalid, so you have your own copy. Or use the repository the button made, which holds only the blog.
2. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Workers & Pages, select Create application, then Pages, then Connect to Git.
3. Select GitHub, allow Cloudflare to read your repository, pick it, and select Begin setup.
4. Fill in the build settings:

Setting	Value
Project name	Your blog's name, such as my-blog. It becomes my-blog.pages.dev
Production branch	main
Framework preset	None
Build command	sh build.sh
Build output directory	public
Root directory (advanced), Path	deploy/cloudflare for a fork of Khalid. Leave it empty for the button's repository
Environment variable	KHALID_ADDRESS set to https://my-blog.pages.dev

5. Select Save and Deploy.

The blog is at https://<project name>.pages.dev a minute or two later.

Set your blog's address

Every page tells search engines its one true address, and Khalid takes it from address in site.toml. The starter says https://blog.example.com, so change it to yours after the first deploy:

• In your repository on GitHub, open site.toml, select the pencil, put your address after address, and commit. Cloudflare builds the blog again.
• Or, in Cloudflare, add the build variable KHALID_ADDRESS with your address. For a Worker it is under Settings, Build, Variables and secrets. Then build again.

Use your own domain

Your domain must use Cloudflare for its DNS, the service that says which server a name points to.

• For the button's Worker: in Workers & Pages, select the Worker, go to Settings, Domains & Routes, Add, Custom Domain, enter the domain, and select Add Custom Domain.
• For Pages: select the project, then Custom domains, and follow the steps.

Then set the blog's address to the new domain, as above.

Turn off Cloudflare's Email Address Obfuscation for the blog: in the domain's dashboard, go to Security, Settings (or Scrape Shield on older dashboards) and switch it off. It rewrites every email address and mailto: link and adds a script from /cdn-cgi/. Khalid's content security policy blocks that script, as it should, so addresses show as "[email protected]" and the share-by-email link opens a missing page.

Write a post

Add a file to content/en/posts/ in your repository, as the welcome post shows, and commit it. Khalid checks every post before it builds. A post that breaks a basic search rule, such as a missing description, is left out, and the build log in Cloudflare says why and how to fix it. docs/getting-started.md explains every field of a post.

Update Khalid

build.sh names the Khalid release it installs, such as version="v1.3.2". A new release never changes your blog until you change that line to the newer release from the releases page and commit.

What is free

Cloudflare's free plan serves the files of a static site with no limit on visits. Workers Builds gives 3,000 build minutes a month, one build at a time, and stops a build after 20 minutes. A Khalid build takes well under a minute.