Introducing Unicorn, a monorepo template built on GitHub Actions and Cloudflare to help you stand out in your job applications by deploying a static site for each job application.

Create repo

First, you'll need to clone the template repository to your own, working repository.

Clone into repo

Next, clone your new repository to your local dev machine. Documenting this step is out of scope for this post but well documented online or on GitHub.

Local edits

The template repository provides the skeleton structure for a nice job application workflow, but it will not work out of the box. You need to do a couple of things to make this project work for you. First, you'll want to rename the sites/unicorn-demo directory to your own site. Make sure to update the package name in the package.json file as well. If you do a project wide search for 'unicorn-demo', this should give you a list to work through and update. One of the updates will be the GitHub Action workflow found in .github/workflows/publish.yml. This workflow is the root of the template. At the heart of it is thematrix property, which declares a mapping of local directories to project names in Cloudflare. We'll explain this in further detail later (LINK).

With these changes in place, do an npm install at the root of the repo and try to run your new website by running

npm run dev -w ./sites/<your-site>

Deployment

You've developed your website and are ready to deploy it. First, either create or login to your Cloudflare account. In your Cloudflare account, navigate to "Profile" -> "API Tokens" -> "Create Token". Under the "Custom token" section, click to create a custom token. Give the token a name and the edit permission to Cloudflare Pages. Copy this token and navigate to your GitHub repository. Add a GitHub secret named 'DEPLOY_TOKEN', pasting the token from the previous step as the value. Add another secret called 'CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID'. Obtain the value for this from the Cloudflare dashboard. Navigate to the "Workers and Pages" section in your Cloudflare account. You should be able to copy the account id from the sidebar of this web page. The workflow will use these secrets to deploy your websites to your Cloudflare account.

While in the Cloudflare dashboard, create your first site. Navigate to "Workers and Pages". Select "create application". Select "Pages" tab. Select "Create using direct upload". Select "Upload assets", although we will be skipping the actual upload of assets (the GH action workflow will do this for us, we just need to create the pages "project" at this point). Give the project a name, and select "Create project" without uploading assets. Take note of the project name you provided. Update the GitHub action's matrix property with this value. You should update the 'project' key.

At this point, everything should be setup for a deployment to succeed. To test this out, push your working repository to the GitHub remote and watch the action run.

DNS

DNS is out of scope for this post. For my own job applications, I use Cloudflare name servers and deploy each website as a subdomain to a personal TLD, which works quite well.

If you have any issues following this post, please open an issue on GitHub.