Cloudflare Pages — how zorc.app goes liveConcept

Cloudflare Pages is the static-file half of how everything at zorc.app goes live: wrangler uploads a folder, Pages serves it from Cloudflare's edge, and a custom domain on your zone points at it. Today you trace one real focaccia-vote deploy end to end.

Cloudflare has two hosting products that look similar but do different jobs. **Pages** serves static files — HTML, JS, CSS, images — exactly as they sit in a folder, copied to Cloudflare's edge servers worldwide. **Workers** runs code on each request — it computes a response instead of returning a file. Your split: focaccia-vote and pdb.zorc.app are Pages (pre-rendered files, nothing computed); the PDB relay backend is Workers territory (it has a `wrangler.jsonc` and Durable Objects, because it holds live state). Rule of thumb: if the answer already exists as a file, Pages; if it has to be calculated per-request, Workers.

A Pages deploy is just an upload with bookkeeping. `wrangler pages deploy <folder>` takes everything in the folder, diffs it against the last deploy, uploads what changed, and stamps the result as a new immutable *deployment* — each one gets its own preview URL (like `abc123.focaccia-vote.pages.dev`) and the project's main URLs flip to point at the newest one. That's why rollback is trivial: old deployments still exist, the pointer just moves. Two special files ride along inside the folder: `_redirects` (URL aliases — focaccia-vote's maps the old `/dashboard` path to `/` with a 301) and `_headers` (per-path HTTP headers — yours forces browsers to revalidate HTML/JS so updates land without cache-busting). They're files in the deploy, not dashboard settings — delete them from the folder and the behavior disappears on the next deploy.

The two failure modes you've personally hit are both 'Pages serves exactly what you gave it.' The 404: Pages auto-maps `/vote.html` to the clean URL `/vote`, but the bare root `/` only works if the folder contains a literal `index.html` — focaccia-vote shipped with only `vote.html` and `dashboard.html`, so `/` was a 404 until you renamed `dashboard.html` to `index.html`. The frozen site: a *git-connected* Pages project rebuilds on every push, but both of your projects are *direct-upload* — GitHub is just backup storage, and the live site only changes when wrangler runs. That's why `/plan-day` step 4 explicitly runs `wrangler pages deploy` after the git push; skip it and pdb.zorc.app shows yesterday forever.

Worked example

The exact deploy path for focaccia-vote, from HANDOFF.md — this is what 'going live' literally is:

cd /Users/tom/Claude/JARBUS/projects/plaud-2ee4b9a7e2b4988b905fd8b897a698e2
wrangler pages deploy live/ --project-name focaccia-vote --branch main --commit-dirty=true

# and the PDB equivalent (plan-day runs this after every git push):
cd ~/Claude/PDB/output
wrangler pages deploy . --project-name pdb --branch main --commit-dirty=true

• `wrangler` is Cloudflare's command-line tool. It authenticates with the OAuth token stored at `~/.wrangler/config/default.toml` — no password prompts, same pattern as `gh` for GitHub.
• `pages deploy live/` — upload the contents of the `live/` folder. Whatever is in that folder IS the site: `index.html`, `vote.html`, `irv.js`, plus the `_redirects` and `_headers` control files.
• `--project-name focaccia-vote` — which Pages project on your account (`9c1201...3181`) receives it. The project is the stable thing; deployments come and go underneath it.
• `--branch main` — labels this a production deployment (production = the branch you designated), so the main URLs update. Other branch names create preview deployments that only get their own preview URL.
• `--commit-dirty=true` — just silences the 'you have uncommitted git changes' warning. Important mental model: wrangler uploads the files on disk, not the git state. Git and Pages are completely separate worlds here.
• After upload, three URLs serve the same deployment: the unique preview URL printed by the command, `focaccia-vote.pages.dev` (free default), and `focaccia-vote.zorc.app` (the custom domain you attached on your zorc.app zone 2026-05-28 — under the hood it's a DNS record pointing at the Pages project).

Gotchas

• git push ≠ deploy. Both of your Pages projects are direct-upload, so GitHub is backup only — the live site changes exclusively via `wrangler pages deploy`. This froze pdb.zorc.app on 2026-06-08 and it will happen again any time the deploy step is skipped after a push.
• No `index.html`, no homepage. Pages gives every file a clean URL (`/vote.html` → `/vote`) but the bare `/` only resolves to a literal `index.html`. That was the focaccia-vote day-one 404.
• `_redirects` and `_headers` must live INSIDE the deployed folder. They ship with each deployment — if a future cleanup deletes them from `live/`, the 301 aliases and cache rules silently vanish on the next deploy.
• The `.pages.dev` URL never goes away. `focaccia-vote.pages.dev` serves the same content as the custom domain — fine for a bread vote, but remember it exists if you ever ship something you'd rather keep behind one canonical URL.
• Deploying the wrong folder is silent and total. `wrangler pages deploy .` from the wrong directory replaces the whole site with whatever is there. The folder argument IS the site — double-check `pwd` before deploying.