Moving from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare Pages

I’ve been using Hugo since 2020 and as part of the setup, according to the docs, I had to create two repositories. One which I called blog for the .md files, and another called rrajath.github.io for the generated HTML files. This led me to a workflow where I write a blog post, commit the file and push it to the blog repo. I then run a script that executes the hugo command generate HTML files. This script also copied the output to the rrajath.github.io directory, committed those changes and then pushed them to the remote.

I didn’t think much back then because I had a script which did all the work. But lately I wanted to find a way to create or update posts from my phone and while investigating ways to do that, I wondered if I could create a GitHub Actions that does this for me. After which I wondered why I even need two repos. I explored alternatives and found Cloudflare Pages to be a great choice because of two reasons:

1. I only need one repo and the build command in Cloudflare pages could be configured to run the hugo command to generate the HTML files as well as run the pagefind index command for updating the search index.
2. I can create a new blog post, send it as a PR, and view it as a draft before publishing the post.

All of this needed just one repo and I really didn’t have to deal with GitHub pages, two repositories, scripts, etc. This really streamlined my blogging workflow and simplified a lot of things.