Deploy & Branch Guide — creative.relayctx.com#

How the creative estate is built, hosted, and shipped. Read this before merging any PR in this repo.

Companion to MAINTENANCE.md (which covers the hub + area index cards, labels, and _redirects rules). This file covers the pipeline: host, build, branch model, and how work reaches production.

TL;DR#

• Host: Cloudflare Pages project relay-creative (né relay-prototype) → serves creative.relayctx.com.
• No build step. The repo root is served as static files, verbatim. The build config is intentionally empty.
• Production branch is main — the GitHub default. A push/merge to main auto-deploys. One trunk; there is no separate deploy branch anymore.
• Work on area-prefixed branches (brand/*, marketing/*, concepts/*, email/*, mcp/*, or chore/*/fix/*), PR into main.
• prototype.relayctx.com is retiring — it redirects to creative.relayctx.com until 2026-08-09, then the custom domain comes off.

Host & build#

The site is a Cloudflare Pages project named relay-creative, connected to christensen-digital/relay-creative. Because the pages are hand-authored HTML/CSS/JS with no bundler or generator, there is no build:

The empty build config is correct, not broken. If someone "fixes" it by adding a build command or output directory, deploys will start serving the wrong path (or nothing). Leave it blank.

Clean URLs are handled by _redirects — a Cloudflare-native file Pages reads automatically. It maps clean paths to versioned files (/concepts/app → /concepts/app-v34), carries the full legacy map from the 2026-07-19 restructure (old /web/* and root paths 301 to their new homes), and holds the host rule that redirects prototype.relayctx.com here. See MAINTENANCE.md for the URL conventions.

Markdown renders branded. A single Pages Function — functions/_middleware.js — intercepts GET *.md and returns the file rendered in the v3.5 reader shell (server-side at the edge; ?raw=1 serves the stored file verbatim). Pages auto-detects functions/ and bundles it itself, so the empty build config still stands. _redirects rules are evaluated before Functions, so the legacy map is unaffected. This is the one non-static piece of the site — keep it that way. Cards to markdown in this repo (briefs/, CHANGELOG.mds, this guide) can link locally now; the documentation pipeline (MkDocs) still covers the separate doc repos — this site doesn't render their markdown, only its own.

Branch model — one trunk#

main is the only long-lived branch. It is the GitHub default, the canonical branch, and the production branch — every merge to main deploys to creative.relayctx.com immediately. The old two-trunk split (prototype = served content, main = docs) was converged on 2026-07-19; docs, briefs, workflows and served pages now travel together, and "merged but didn't ship" can't happen anymore.

Working branches are area-prefixed and short-lived:

Branch from main, keep the branch scoped to its area, PR back into main. A page lands with its card, its _redirects entry (if its clean URL changed), and a line in its area CHANGELOG.md — in the same PR.

Area → branch, at a glance#

Every area folder ships from the same single branch. prototype, brand, marketing, etc. are not separate deploy pipelines — they're folders in this one repo that all merge into main and go live together on the next push:

The historical prototype branch is frozen at the convergence point — don't push to it. It does not deploy (Cloudflare's production branch is main; prototype.relayctx.com is now only a redirect shim, see below), but it has still been taking stray merges since the freeze (e.g. PR #185 on 2026-07-26, PR #192 on 2026-07-29) — those changes are not live anywhere. If a PR's base defaults to prototype, that's the trap: retarget it to main. The branch will be deleted once the redirect window closes (2026-08-09) — see the domain migration section below.

Previews & rollback#

• Preview deploys: Cloudflare Pages builds a preview URL for every non-production branch / PR, so you can eyeball a change before it hits main (and production).
• Rollback: there's no build to revert to — roll back from the Cloudflare Pages dashboard (Deployments → pick a previous successful deploy → Rollback), or revert the commit on main and push.

Domain migration — prototype → creative (2026-07-19)#

The gallery moved from prototype.relayctx.com to creative.relayctx.com when the repo was restructured by area (hub at /, areas at /concepts/, /marketing/, /brand/, /email/, /mcp/).

Grace window: both custom domains stay attached to the Pages project; the host rule at the top of _redirects 301s every prototype.relayctx.com URL to the same path on creative.relayctx.com, and the legacy path map carries it on to the page's new home. Old bookmarks land correctly through both hops.

Retire date: 2026-08-09 (3 weeks). After that:

1. Cloudflare Pages → the project's Custom domains → remove prototype.relayctx.com.
2. Delete the prototype.relayctx.com DNS record (relayctx.com zone).
3. Delete the host rule at the top of _redirects.
4. Delete the frozen prototype branch on GitHub.

One-time dashboard setup (done at migration)#

For the record, the migration required, in order: verify the restructure PR merged to main → Pages project → Settings → Builds & deployments → Production branch: main → Custom domains → add creative.relayctx.com → confirm both domains resolve → merge the _redirects host rule → rename the Pages project relay-prototype → relay-creative (renaming changes the *.pages.dev preview hostnames — custom domains are unaffected, but any saved preview links go stale, so re-grab preview URLs after the rename).

Last updated: 2026-07-19 · relay-creative/GUIDE.deploy.md