A Static Delivery Path with Cloudflare, Azure, and Nginx

A personal homepage does not need a complex runtime. For Astro’s static output, a short delivery path is usually more reliable: Git manages the source, a local machine or CI produces dist/, Nginx serves static files, and Cloudflare sits at the public edge.

Separate building from serving

The server stores build artifacts and does not run Node.js. A release is uploaded to a temporary directory and checked before the active site directory changes, reducing the chance of exposing a half-finished deployment.

npm ci
npm run build
rsync -az --delete dist/ server:/tmp/site-next/

Nginx can serve Astro routes through directory indexes. A missing path should return a real 404 rather than falling back to the homepage, which improves search behavior and diagnosis.

Cache policy

Content-hashed assets under /_astro/ can use long-lived immutable caching. HTML should have a short lifetime so content changes appear quickly. Cloudflare and origin rules should agree; otherwise stale-content diagnosis gains another source of uncertainty.

Rollback

Keeping the previous release directory and pointing a symbolic link at the active version provides a low-cost rollback. A deployment is complete not when upload finishes, but when status codes, important pages, and static assets have been checked through the public domain.