Off Pages, onto Workers

This site ran on Cloudflare Pages its whole life: a static index.html plus a _worker.js in Pages advanced mode. On 2026-06-30 it moved to Cloudflare Workers with static assets. Same holding/ folder, same worker code, byte-for-byte identical responses (I diffed them before flipping the domain). What changed is everything around the bytes: how it deploys, what it can bind, and where its configuration lives.

Why it moved

Not for a feature. For an outage. A git-connected Pages build deployed the static files but silently dropped the Function, so every static path answered 200 and every worker route answered 404. From the outside the site looked up; underneath, half of it was gone. That failure is structural to how the Pages build treated this repo, so rather than paper over it, I moved to Workers, where a deploy is atomic: the worker and its assets ship together or not at all. There is no window where the shell is live and the brain is missing.

The real unlock: configuration as code

On Pages, the project's wiring lived in the dashboard. The KV namespace, the R2 bucket, the D1 database, the Durable Object, the environment variables: all clicked in through a web UI, invisible to git, undocumented outside my own memory, impossible to diff or review. Rebuilding the project meant remembering every toggle I had ever flipped.

On Workers, all of it is one checked-in file, wrangler.jsonc:

{
  "name": "aadhar-sh",
  "main": "holding/_worker.js/index.js",
  "assets": {
    "directory": "holding",
    "binding": "ASSETS",
    "run_worker_first": ["/*", "!/nav.js", "!/garage/*", "!/images/*.avif", ...]
  },
  "kv_namespaces":  [{ "binding": "RN_KV",   "id": "..." }],
  "r2_buckets":     [{ "binding": "PHOTOS_R2", "bucket_name": "aadhar-photos" }],
  "d1_databases":   [{ "binding": "RESTORE_DB", "database_id": "..." }],
  "durable_objects": { "bindings": [{ "name": "COUNTER", "class_name": "Counter" }] },
  "migrations":      [{ "tag": "v1", "new_sqlite_classes": ["Counter"] }]
}

The binding list is now a code review, not a screenshot. A clean checkout plus one wrangler deploy reconstructs the entire project. There is exactly one honest exception: secrets. The signing key, the render token, and the cache-bust secret stay out of git on purpose, set once with wrangler secret put. A checkout is reproducible; it is deliberately not turnkey without those three.

What it opened up

Given the constraint I care about most here (this site is frameworkless and buildless, and staying that way), the interesting question was never "which framework." It was: what can the platform do once the config is code? Four things I have already used, and a few more now in reach.

export class Counter { async fetch(req){ /* atomic ++ in state.storage */ } }

Still on the table

Things the move makes reachable that I have not built yet, kept honest because none of them ship today:

• Cron Triggers. A Worker can run on a schedule; Pages cannot. The Spotify now-playing cache, the /around crawl, and the (undeployed) cal/ booking sweep are all lazy-on-request today. Any of them could move to a scheduled handler that warms the cache before a visitor ever asks.
• Service bindings, Queues, Workflows, Containers. All bindable from the same config, none of which fit Pages advanced mode cleanly. I do not need them for a personal site, but the ceiling moved.
• Compression. Left at the platform default in this move. The old plan to ship precompressed brotli twins died on Pages (it ignored uploaded .br siblings). On Workers it is revisitable, just not done.

The honest scorecard