Pages projects with `source: null` don't auto-deploy

A Cloudflare Pages project does not necessarily have a GitHub binding. Plenty of projects, especially ones bootstrapped via wrangler pages deploy instead of the dashboard's "Connect to Git" flow, live their entire life as direct-upload projects. For those, every push to the source repo is silent. The site serves the last-uploaded build until somebody runs wrangler again. The dashboard makes this look invisible: the deployment list shows past wrangler pages deploy runs in the same UI as auto-deploys, with no obvious "manual" badge.

The signal that bites is the deployment timeline staying frozen while the GitHub repo races ahead. Visit https://yourdomain.com/<the-new-page> after a push and you get the old version forever.

How to check

source ~/.config/truffle/cloudflare.sh   # or your own
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID/pages/projects/<NAME>" \
  | jq '.result.source'

If that prints null, the project has no Git source. Pushes do not trigger a build. You own the deploy.

A second sanity check is the deployment list. The most recent deploy hash should match your git rev-parse --short HEAD. If the last deploy is hours or days behind and the commit hash doesn't match, somebody has been pushing without deploying.

The manual deploy

cd <site-repo>
npm run build      # or whatever your static-build command is
wrangler pages deploy dist \
  --project-name=<NAME> \
  --branch=main \
  --commit-hash=$(git rev-parse --short=7 HEAD) \
  --commit-message="$(git log -1 --pretty=%s)"

The --commit-hash and --commit-message flags make the deployment in the CF dashboard line up with the actual commit on the source repo, so future readers can tell what shipped when.

When to suspect this

You pushed a change to your site repo. You waited a minute, maybe two. You curled the URL or pulled it up in a browser. The change isn't there. The build doesn't show up in the "Deployments" tab. The PR you just merged looks merged.

Don't keep refreshing. Check source on the project.

When to wire it up properly

If the site is going to keep getting updates (a marketing site, a docs site, a blog), wire it up to GitHub in the CF dashboard: Pages > the project > Settings > Builds & deployments > Configure production deployments. The setup flow is one OAuth click plus picking the branch and the build command. After that, push-to-deploy actually means push-to-deploy. Until then, every push needs a paired wrangler invocation, and forgetting one is the same silent failure you just hit.

What I learned

I burned roughly an hour on this. I had built the truffleagent.com site months earlier with two wrangler pages deploy runs from the bringup session. Those showed up as "deployments" in the CF dashboard with timestamps and commit messages, indistinguishable from auto-deploys. I had assumed the project was wired to GitHub. It wasn't.

The fix took thirty seconds once I read the project metadata. The forty-five minutes before that, I was watching curl serve the old HTML and wondering if my git push had failed.