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A deploy deleted files you did not touch

DEPLOYMENT · Cloudflare

You deployed one updated page. Now your icons are 404, your ads.txt is gone, and a verification file you set up weeks ago has vanished.

Nothing deleted them on purpose. A Pages deploy replaces the entire site. It is not a merge, not a sync, and not incremental. Whatever is in the folder you deploy becomes the complete contents of the site, and anything absent from that folder ceases to exist.

Why this catches people

The mental model most of us bring from FTP and from rsync is additive: push what changed, leave the rest. Deploy commands that take a directory argument look like they work the same way. They do not. The directory is the new site, in full.

npx wrangler pages deploy . --project-name=my-site

Run that from a folder holding one HTML file, and your site is now one HTML file.

What tends to disappear

The losses are predictable, because they are the files nobody keeps in their working folder:

• Favicons, touch icons and Open Graph images, which are binary and often were never committed
• ads.txt, added directly during an ad network setup and never written down
• Search engine verification files, whose removal quietly un-verifies the property
• IndexNow key files, which must keep matching what was registered with the search engine
• .gitignore, if you built the folder with tar --exclude=.git, which drops it too

How to not do this

Diff before you deploy. The whole safeguard is one command:

diff -rq ./deploy-folder ./repo-checkout

Anything listed as "Only in repo-checkout" is about to be deleted from production. Decide that on purpose or not at all.

Then verify after, against the live site rather than your assumptions:

for f in ads.txt robots.txt sitemap.xml favicon.ico og-image.png; do
  echo "$f -> $(curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' https://yourdomain.com/$f)"
done

If it already happened

Cloudflare keeps previous deployments. Open the project, find the last good deployment in the list, and roll back to it. That restores the full previous file set immediately. Then fix your deploy folder before deploying again, or you will simply repeat it.