Walkable Limited Liability Company

Independent IT/Cloud Support

Sergei Gussev
stocksnap.io

Setting up my website with Cloudflare

Figuring out what hosting is, how to route my traffic through Cloudflare, and setting up DNS records.

Buying my domain

I bought a domain with the idea to create a portfolio website under my LLC (US-based) to show my projects, homelabs and whatever else I may do in future. I bought one through Cloudflare's registrar for around $10-16 a year. Afterwards, I used a template from Vercel that looked neat and professional, after trying to build one from scratch (still active in my GitHub!). After picking one, it took a bit of configuring and trying out multiple deployments to figure out how to set up my deployment on GitHub and connect it to Cloudflare.

How?

I faffed with the deployment a few times before settling on using the template off of the original GitHub repo. After editing the data, I committed/pushed on to my remote repo. I then used the Cloudflare Docs to deploy an existing Next.js project on Workers, namely installing opennextjs, Wrangler CLI and a Wrangler/OpenNext config file. I'm still deploying from the GitHub repo instead of the workers.dev subdomain as that's how I started. I then altered the Custom Domain through Routes, which took a bit of reading and AI help as well (setting up a placeholder DNS A record pointing at 192.0.2.1 before setting up .walk-llc.com/).

Challenges

  • DNS Records: This was covered in my CompTIA A+ exam but it didn't go through actual configurations, and Cloudflare allows me to set them up manually, something I haven't done with other cloud providers where I didn't have a custom domain. Took a lot of consulting documentation and Gemini/AI help to ensure I correctly set up A and CNAME records.
  • Routing: I thought setting up www and connecting it to my custom domain was simple, but the template I used was a full stack Next.js app. So I had to go backwards and figure out what routing was! I probably need a refresher already but the Cloudflare docs combined with AI and good old Google makes it easy enough.
  • Build Errors: I had multiple build errors initially when figuring out deployment issues - turned out to be compatibility and probably bits leftover in the build cache.

Conclusion

I probably wouldn't have gone with a template off Vercel for a starter website while I'm also trying to figure out DNS config as a beginner. It was a bit of an uphill climb but here we are!

References