Perspective · Learning lab

From manual uploads to CI/CD

This site is my learning lab. I am here to learn how it works by doing something real. This discussion is about what changed in the way I publish it.

Where I started

Until recently, every change meant uploading the whole site by hand. I kept one folder per version on my drive, zipped the latest one, and sent it to Cloudflare. I was repeating this step even when I had changed a small sentence.

It worked, but of course I was not bringing updates frequently and I was not controlling errors or a list of current changes implemented. The only record of what had changed was my memory and a list of notes, and the only test was opening the page afterwards and looking at it.

How it works now

Now, the site lives in a Git repository on GitHub. I make small changes on a separate branch and open a pull request, and GitHub runs the tests on it. The public version only changes when I merge into main, after every check has passed. Cloudflare takes it from there.

A real example: updating the maps

My Two runoffs post links to two interactive maps, and I had a new final version of them. In the old routine that meant a new folder, a new zip and a full upload. This time the whole change was two files:

public/perspective/brazil-runoffs/maps/mapa_eleicao_2022.html
public/perspective/brazil-runoffs/maps/mapa_eleicao_2026.html

The maps come out of a script, and the new files did not include the Cloudflare Web Analytics snippet. I knew that and I had written a check for this case. I wanted to know whether it would flag the error.

It did. Here is the relevant part of the log:

FAIL .../maps/mapa_eleicao_2022.html: Web Analytics script present exactly once  ->  found 0, fsartori.com token missing
FAIL .../maps/mapa_eleicao_2026.html: Web Analytics script present exactly once  ->  found 0, fsartori.com token missing

28 checks passed, 2 failed.

I added the snippet to both files and pushed again to the same branch. The tests ran again on their own and passed, and only then did I merge. This is the whole sequence:

Why this check exists

I use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see how many people visit the site and which pages they open. When I moved the site from Cloudflare Pages to Workers, the snippet that Cloudflare used to add automatically disappeared after a deploy. So it now lives in the HTML of every page, and a test requires it exactly once per page.

This kind of mistake is easy to miss. Without the snippet the maps look perfect and no error appears anywhere. I would only have noticed later, as a gap in the numbers.

On every pull request, my tests check that:

• no sensitive or development files are in the published folder, and no file exceeds the host's size limit;
• security headers are in place, and the analytics snippet appears once per page;
• local links and images exist, external resources use https, and the JavaScript has no syntax errors.