Preact

Preact ↗ is a popular, open-source framework for building modern web applications. Preact can also be used as a lightweight alternative to React because the two share the same API and component model.

In this guide, you will create a new Preact application and deploy it using Cloudflare Pages. You will use wmr ↗, an all-in-one development tool built by the Preact team, to quickly generate an optimized web application.

Setting up a new project

Create a new project by running the npm init ↗ command in your terminal, giving it a title:

npm init wmr your-project-name
cd your-project-name

Before you continue

All of the framework guides assume you already have a fundamental understanding of Git ↗. If you are new to Git, refer to this summarized Git handbook ↗ on how to set up Git on your local machine.

If you clone with SSH, you must generate SSH keys ↗ on each computer you use to push or pull from GitHub.

Refer to the GitHub documentation ↗ and Git documentation ↗ for more information.

Create a GitHub repository

Create a new GitHub repository by visiting repo.new ↗. After creating a new repository, go to your newly created project directory to prepare and push your local application to GitHub by running the following commands in your terminal:

git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/<your-gh-username>/<repository-name>
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git branch -M main
git push -u origin main

Deploy with Cloudflare Pages

To deploy your site to Pages:

1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard ↗ and select your account.
2. In Account Home, select Workers & Pages > Create application > Pages > Connect to Git.

You will be asked to authorize access to your GitHub account if you have not already done so. Cloudflare needs this so that it can monitor and deploy your projects from the source. You may narrow access to specific repositories if you prefer; however, you will have to manually update this list within your GitHub settings ↗ when you want to add more repositories to Cloudflare Pages.

Select the new GitHub repository that you created and, in the Set up builds and deployments section, provide the following information:

Configuration option	Value
Production branch	main
Build command	npm run build
Build directory	dist

Optionally, you can customize the Project name field. It defaults to the GitHub repository’s name, but it does not need to match. The Project name value is assigned as your *.pages.dev subdomain.

After completing configuration, select Save and Deploy.

You will see your first deploy pipeline in progress. Pages installs all dependencies and builds the project as specified.

Note

Note: You will notice that within the package.json file, the "build" script uses the --prerender flag. With this, wmr produces static HTML pages – along with their assets – which is perfect for Pages.

After you have deployed your site, you will receive a unique subdomain for your project on *.pages.dev.

Cloudflare Pages will automatically rebuild your project and deploy it on every new pushed commit.

Additionally, you will have access to preview deployments, which repeat the build-and-deploy process for pull requests. With these, you can preview changes to your project with a real URL before deploying them to production.

Note

For the complete guide to deploying your first site to Cloudflare Pages, refer to the Get started guide.

Learn more

By completing this guide, you have successfully deployed your Preact site to Cloudflare Pages. To get started with other frameworks, refer to the list of Framework guides.