New Home for the Blog: changzh.me + Fully Automated Cloudflare Deployment

Good News: The Blog Has Its Own Domain

Starting today, this blog has a dedicated, easy-to-remember new domain:

https://changzh.me

The old, unwieldy address changzhihang.github.io/blog/ has been intentionally retired — it is no longer maintained and should no longer point to this site. A note of caution: if you ever click a link somewhere and get redirected to that old address, something is misconfigured. Please let me know so I can track it down and fix it. The new domain is not only easier to remember — the entire technical stack behind it has been upgraded. The site now runs on Cloudflare’s global network, loading faster and more reliably, with HTTPS included automatically.

This post documents the complete migration and configuration process. If you want to set up a custom domain and fully automated deployment for your own static blog, consider this a step-by-step walkthrough you can follow.

Understanding the Key Concepts

Before diving in, it helps to understand how a website stays “alive” on the internet.

• Hosting: Your web files need to sit on a server that is on 24/7 so visitors can access them at any time. Your own computer shuts down — you need a machine that is always online to store and serve your site.
• DNS: The internet’s “phone book.” It translates a domain name (changzh.me) into an IP address that machines understand.
• CDN: Caches your web pages at nodes distributed around the world so users load them from a nearby location, making the site faster.
• CI/CD: Lets a machine automatically “build and deploy” for you. You focus on writing; everything else is automated.

Cloudflare covers hosting, DNS, CDN, and HTTPS all in one — and the free tier is more than enough for a personal blog.

Why Move from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare

The blog was originally hosted on GitHub Pages, which also supported automatic deployment and worked quite well. The reasons for this migration were:

1. Get a clean custom domain and escape the long github.io/blog/ address;
2. Experience Cloudflare’s global CDN for faster load times;
3. Walk through the full modern site-building workflow and actually internalize the concepts.

Worth noting: this blog is built with Hugo (a static site generator). Hugo has a key characteristic — source code is not the final product:

Markdown posts + templates   →   [hugo build]   →   HTML the browser can render

So you cannot upload the source directly — it must be “built” first. Who does the building? That is where automation comes in.

The Core Approach: Let GitHub Build, Then Push to Cloudflare

Rather than using Cloudflare’s built-in Git integration, I chose to write the pipeline myself in GitHub Actions to maintain full control over the process:

Write post locally → git push
        ↓
GitHub Actions automatically:
   1. Install Hugo + pull theme
   2. hugo build → public/ (the final HTML)
   3. Use wrangler to push public/ to Cloudflare Pages
        ↓
Cloudflare global hosting + automatic HTTPS
        ↓
Visitors open changzh.me instantly

The key deployment step looks like this (wrangler is Cloudflare’s official CLI tool):

- name: Deploy to Cloudflare Pages
  run: npx wrangler@3 pages deploy public --project-name blogofbrian --branch main
  env:
    CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN }}
    CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID: ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID }}

An Important Security Detail: API Tokens

GitHub’s servers need to push files into my Cloudflare account — but why should Cloudflare allow that? You certainly cannot hard-code your account password into a script — that would be far too dangerous.

The right approach is an API Token:

• It is a scoped key — I granted it only “edit Pages” permission and nothing else. Even if it leaks, no one can delete my account, touch DNS settings, or access billing. This is the principle of least privilege.
• The token is stored in GitHub Secrets (an encrypted vault). The workflow can use it, but no one reading the code can see the actual value — the public script only contains ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN }}, a name, not the secret itself.

If it ever leaks: go to Cloudflare, revoke the old token, and generate a new one. The old key becomes instantly useless.

A Pitfall Along the Way

On the first push, the build succeeded but the deployment failed with Project not found.

The reason: there was no corresponding project “folder” on Cloudflare yet. Wrangler tried to push to a destination that did not exist and naturally failed. (The script was intended to auto-create it, but there is a known quirk when creating the very first project via the CLI.)

The fix was straightforward — manually create the project once in the Cloudflare dashboard, and automatic deployment has worked flawlessly ever since.

A useful lesson: error messages are not scary — they tell you what is missing. Project not found = the target does not exist → create the target first.

Final Step: Binding the Domain and Fixing Links

Because the domain was registered directly through Cloudflare, DNS was already under Cloudflare’s control, making the custom domain binding nearly one-click. The HTTPS certificate was issued automatically.

After binding, there was one loose end: some posts had hardcoded old-domain links (pointing to github.io/blog/...), which would 404 after the domain change. The fix was to convert them to relative links (/physics/...), decoupling them from the domain entirely — they work correctly regardless of which address is used.

The Result

A complete blog system with a custom domain, fully automated deployment, and global acceleration is now in place:

Now whenever I write a new post, I just git push locally, and it appears on changzh.me within a minute automatically.

Closing Thoughts

Going from “a long, forgettable URL” to “your own domain backed by an automated engineering pipeline” — every concept along the way (hosting, DNS, CDN, CI/CD, API tokens) is a fundamental pattern in how modern software ships. Walking through it hands-on is worth more than reading ten tutorials.

Bookmark the new address changzh.me — see you in the next post.