Cloudflare Workers Edge Configuration Walkthrough
Goal: build a small customer-facing technical demo that shows how DNS, HTTPS/TLS, HTTP headers, redirects, caching, and page-load behavior can be configured and validated for a static site on a custom domain.
1. Architecture
The main portfolio remains on Vercel at www.dongqing-li.com.
This lab uses edge-lab.dongqing-li.com as a separate
Cloudflare Workers Static Assets deployment so Cloudflare-specific
behavior can be tested without adding an extra reverse proxy layer in
front of the portfolio.
2. DNS
The subdomain is added as a Workers custom domain. DNS is managed in Cloudflare, and Cloudflare creates the DNS record and certificate for the custom domain. Requests to the hostname invoke the Worker directly.
dig edge-lab.dongqing-li.com
dig CNAME edge-lab.dongqing-li.com
Validation result: edge-lab.dongqing-li.com resolves to
Cloudflare anycast IPs, and the authoritative nameservers are
bruce.ns.cloudflare.com and
phoenix.ns.cloudflare.com.
3. HTTPS / TLS
The site is served over HTTPS. TLS can be checked in the browser certificate viewer and with command-line response inspection.
curl -I https://edge-lab.dongqing-li.com
Validation result: the custom domain returns HTTP/2 200
over HTTPS and includes a Cloudflare edge response marker
(cf-ray).
4. HTTP Response Headers
Security-oriented headers are configured using the static
_headers file and verified with curl -I.
curl -I https://edge-lab.dongqing-li.com
Validation result: the response includes
strict-transport-security,
x-content-type-options, x-frame-options,
referrer-policy, and permissions-policy.
5. Redirect Behavior
A simple redirect rule maps /old-walkthrough to the
current walkthrough page. This demonstrates how redirect behavior can
be tested without changing application code.
curl -I https://edge-lab.dongqing-li.com/old-walkthrough
Validation result: the legacy URL returns HTTP/2 301
with location: /walkthrough.html.
6. Cache Behavior
The cache test asset is configured with a long-lived cache policy
through the static assets _headers file.
Repeated requests can be used to observe response headers such as
cache-control, cf-cache-status, and
age.
curl -I https://edge-lab.dongqing-li.com/assets/cache-demo.json
curl -I https://edge-lab.dongqing-li.com/assets/cache-demo.json
Validation result: the JSON asset returns cf-cache-status: HIT
and cache-control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable.
7. Performance Check
Page load can be tested with Lighthouse, browser DevTools, or Cloudflare speed tooling. The key metrics to capture are TTFB, transfer size, cache behavior, and Core Web Vitals where available.
8. Learning Summary
This demo shows practical understanding of customer-facing technical work: choosing a clean architecture, configuring DNS records, enabling HTTPS, validating HTTP behavior, explaining cache trade-offs, and documenting reproducible tests.