Cloudflare Pages is a great fit for Zest sites — it's free, fast, and supports custom build commands. This guide walks you through setting up continuous deployment from a Git repository.

Prerequisites

  • A Zest site in a Git repository (GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket)
  • A Cloudflare account

Important: .NET SDK is not pre-installed

Cloudflare Pages build images are minimal Linux environments. They do not come with the .NET SDK pre-installed, which means you cannot run dotnet tool install --global zest directly.

Every build must first install the .NET SDK before it can run Zest. This is done via the official dotnet-install.sh script at the start of the build process.

Both approaches below (build script and one-liner) handle this automatically.

Step 1: Choose your build method

Create a build.sh at the root of your repository:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# dotnet-install.sh downloads the .NET SDK at build time because
# Cloudflare Pages images do not include it.
curl -sSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh > dn.sh
chmod +x dn.sh
./dn.sh --channel 10.0 --install-dir $HOME/.dotnet
export PATH="$HOME/.dotnet:$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$PATH"
export DOTNET_ROOT="$HOME/.dotnet"
export DOTNET_ROOT_X64="$HOME/.dotnet"
hash -r
dotnet tool install --global zest
zest build

Commit and push build.sh to your repository, then set the build command in Cloudflare to:

bash build.sh

Option B: One-liner build command

If you prefer not to have a separate script file, paste the entire process as a single command directly into the Cloudflare Dashboard build field:

curl -sSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh > dn.sh && chmod +x dn.sh && ./dn.sh --channel 10.0 --install-dir $HOME/.dotnet && export PATH="$HOME/.dotnet:$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$PATH" && export DOTNET_ROOT="$HOME/.dotnet" && export DOTNET_ROOT_X64="$HOME/.dotnet" && hash -r && dotnet tool install --global zest && zest build

Step 2: Connect your repository

  1. Log in to the Cloudflare Dashboard.
  2. Go to Workers & Pages → Pages.
  3. Click Create a project → Connect to Git.
  4. Select your Zest site repository and click Begin setup.

Step 3: Configure build settings

Under Build settings, enter:

Setting Value
Build command bash build.sh (Option A) or paste the one-liner (Option B)
Build output directory _site
Root directory (optional) leave blank

Understanding the build process

When Cloudflare Pages triggers a build, here is what happens step by step:

  1. Cloudflare spins up a fresh ephemeral Linux container with Node.js, Python, and other common runtimes — but no .NET SDK
  2. The dotnet-install.sh script downloads the .NET 10.0 SDK and places it in $HOME/.dotnet
  3. Environment variables (PATH, DOTNET_ROOT, DOTNET_ROOT_X64) are set so the .NET CLI is discoverable
  4. dotnet tool install --global zest installs the Zest global tool
  5. zest build runs the Zest build, which processes your content and outputs the static site to the _site/ directory
  6. Cloudflare Pages publishes _site/ to its global edge network

The entire .NET installation adds roughly 30–60 seconds to each build. This overhead is per-build since Cloudflare does not cache the SDK across builds.

Step 4: Deploy

Click Save and Deploy. Cloudflare Pages will execute your build command, and within a minute or two your site will be live at your <project>.pages.dev domain.

Automatic redeploys

Every time you push to your repository, Cloudflare Pages automatically rebuilds and redeploys your site. You can also configure:

  • Custom domain — add your own domain under the Pages project settings
  • Branch deploys — preview changes from feature branches before merging
  • Environment variables — useful for configuring different outputs per environment

Summary

Deploying a Zest site to Cloudflare Pages is straightforward once you account for the missing .NET SDK. With a build.sh script (or one-liner) that installs .NET at the start of every build, your site compiles to plain HTML and is served globally on Cloudflare's edge network — no server, no database, no maintenance.

For the repository template, you can also include a .pages.toml or configure everything through the dashboard. The key takeaway: always install .NET first, and point the output directory to _site.