I had a live web app in Azure that I wanted to hook up with a CDN using Cloudflare. Good news – Cloudflare has a free Global CDN offering and so I didn’t have to pay anything to use it. For more details about what other features you can have with a free account, see here.
These are the steps I took to bring my site over to Cloudflare:
- Create an account over at Cloudflare
- Enter site details. Cloudflare will then query the DNS records of your site
- Verify all the DNS records are correct
- The A record should be your Azure web app’s IP address
- If you have subdomains, verify the CNAME records are also imported, pointing to yoursitename.azurewebsites.net
- Navigate to your DNS control panel (i.e. Namecheap, GoDaddy, CrazyDomains) and change your nameservers. The name servers will be provided by Cloudflare. In my case, they were:
- adam.ns.cloudflare.com
- nina.ns.cloudflare.com
- If your site is on HTTPS, make sure the following are set
- Crypto tab – SSL settings should be set to “Full” if your SSL cert is configured in Azure (or at the origin). Your site may go down if you have a certificate in Azure and the setting is set to “Flexible”. This happened in my case. More details here.
- Crypto tab – Set “Always use HTTPS” to ON
- Crypto tab – Set “Automatic HTTPS rewrites” to ON
- Wait for about 24 hours for it to completely ported over.
- To test, navigate to your website and “Inspect” / open developer tools on a browser. There should be a script added to your HTML that looks like the below:
https://ajax.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/scripts/b7ef205d/cloudflare-static/rocket.min.js
Enjoy the added speed of CDN-loaded static files 🙂