Deployment

A built section can go to three different places. This page covers the choice properly — the in-app picker only has room for a caption.

The three destinations

Whichever you choose, what gets deployed is the same site — the exact pages you previewed. Only where it ends up differs, and you can change your mind later without rewriting anything.

Netlify — the default

A free hosting account, one site per section, at an address like ics3u-s1-2025-gordon.netlify.app. The address is suggested once and stays fixed after that, so a link handed out in September still works in June.

This is the right choice for most teachers starting out — the app does the account creation for you the first time you deploy. The one thing worth knowing: Netlify's free accounts can turn requests away for a few minutes if a whole staff room deploys at once, say at a workshop. It resolves itself in a few minutes; nothing is lost.

Cloudflare Pages — for unmetered bandwidth, or a free address per section

Also free, also one project per section, at an address like ics3u-s1-2025-gordon.pages.dev. Worth choosing if a class page carries a lot of images or embedded documents and you'd rather not think about bandwidth limits — Cloudflare's free plan doesn't limit how much your students download.

Setup asks for two things instead of one — see below.

A folder on this computer — for a board or university web space

No hosting account at all. The app copies the built site into a folder you choose, one sectionN subfolder per class, and only changed files are copied on later deploys — a page you remove locally is removed there too. You upload that folder to wherever your board or university already gives you space — over SFTP, a network share, whatever you normally use.

A page opened straight from that folder won't look quite right on this computer — the site expects to be served over the web, not read off disk. Once it's on your host, it looks the same as the other two.

A section can also deploy to more than one of these at once, for redundancy — set that up once and every deploy after it goes to each of them.

Setting up Netlify

Nothing to set up ahead of time. Deploy a section for the first time and the app asks for your last name (used once, to build the site's address) and walks you through connecting a Netlify account. After that, every deploy for that section reuses the same site.

Setting up Cloudflare Pages

Two things, and only one comes from you directly.

An API token

Create one in the Cloudflare dashboard with exactly one permission: Account → Cloudflare Pages → Edit. Nothing broader is needed, and nothing broader is asked for.

An Account ID

A token scoped this narrowly can't look up its own account — that's a Cloudflare limitation, not an app one — so the app asks for your Cloudflare Account ID once, up front, rather than mid-deploy. It's on the same dashboard page as the token.

Enter both once and every Cloudflare course you deploy afterward reuses them.

Setting up a folder

Choose the destination folder once under Deploying in Course Settings. No account, no token — the app just needs to know where to copy files.

The one real limit

Cloudflare Pages won't accept a single file larger than 25 MB. Netlify and a folder on your own web space don't share that limit.

In practice it rarely matters. Documents, images and slide decks are comfortably under it. Long-form video is the exception — which is exactly why most teachers embed video from YouTube or Vimeo rather than uploading it. That sidesteps the limit for any destination, not just Cloudflare's.

If a file is too large for Cloudflare, the app tells you which one before it uploads anything, rather than failing partway through.

On a schedule

Choose Schedule Deploy… on a section, pick a time, and the section deploys itself then — the same site you would deploy by hand, to the same places.

Your computer has to be awake for it, or wake up soon after. If it was asleep, the deploy runs when it wakes — unless too long has passed, which you set per course ("How late a scheduled deploy may still run"). Past that, it leaves the site as it was and tells you.

Either way you hear about it: a note on the section, and a notification that opens the section when you click it.

Some real class sites

Built from ready-made course material and deployed exactly the way described above.