Deploying Your First Worker

You've learned to set up your environment and write a basic Cloudflare Worker. Now, let's make it accessible to the world!

Deploying your Worker means pushing your code to Cloudflare's global network, making it run at the 'edge' – closer to your users.

Before deploying, ensure you've completed a couple of essential steps:

• Cloudflare Account: You need an active Cloudflare account.
• Wrangler Login: You must be logged in to Wrangler CLI. If not, run wrangler login to authenticate with your Cloudflare account.

These prerequisites ensure Wrangler has permission to deploy to your account.

The core command for deploying your Cloudflare Worker is wrangler publish.

You run this command from within your Worker project directory. It handles everything from bundling your code to updating it on Cloudflare's edge network.

When you run wrangler publish, several things happen:

• Bundling: Your Worker code (often JavaScript or TypeScript) is processed and optimized.
• Uploading: The bundled code is securely uploaded to Cloudflare's global network.
• Deployment: Cloudflare then makes your Worker live, routing requests to it from the edge closest to the user.

This process is usually very fast!

Let's use a simple 'Hello from the Edge!' Worker for deployment. This Worker responds to any incoming request with a plain text message.

Try running this example locally first, then we'll deploy it.

Assuming you have the example Worker code in a project folder (e.g., my-first-worker) and have run wrangler login, navigate to that directory in your terminal.

Then, simply execute the publish command:

After running wrangler publish, you'll see output in your terminal indicating success. It will also provide the public URL where your Worker is now live.

This URL typically looks like https://your-worker-name.your-username.workers.dev.

Now that your Worker is deployed, let's test it! You can use your web browser or a command-line tool like curl.

Open your browser and navigate to the URL provided by wrangler publish. You should see 'Hello from the Edge!'.

The beauty of Workers is how easy it is to update them. If you make changes to your Worker's code, simply save your changes and run wrangler publish again.

Cloudflare will automatically update your live Worker with the new code, often within seconds!

You've just deployed your first Worker! Let's quickly review the steps involved.

Congratulations! You've successfully deployed your first Cloudflare Worker to the edge network.

• You used wrangler publish to deploy your code.
• You verified its live functionality via its public URL.
• You learned that updates are as simple as running publish again.

Your code is now running globally, closer to users than ever before!