For bands · from a fan

Before you open Cloudflare, here’s what it’s going to ask you.

A name and a password, and that is all. Your Stripe key comes later, inside your own store’s admin, where it is checked the moment you paste it. Nothing here costs money and nothing you do in the next ten minutes is permanent: a store you don’t like can be deleted and redone.

Open Cloudflare in a new tabBack to the stepsBack to For bands

It opens in its own tab, so this page stays here beside it. Come back to this tab whenever it asks for something.

What it asks, in order

1. Sign in to GitHub, then Cloudflare.

   Both free. GitHub holds the code, Cloudflare runs it. If you don’t have them, make them in the band’s name rather than one member’s personal account; it matters later when someone leaves the band.

2. A project name nobody has used.

   Something like yourband-store. It becomes part of your free web address, and you can put your own domain in front of it afterwards.

3. ADMIN_KEY

   The password for your store’s admin, and the only thing it asks you to type. Make up something long, or take a password manager’s suggestion, and keep it: you type it once per phone or laptop to sign in. Forgotten later, it can be changed in Cloudflare in a minute.

4. Press Deploy.

   Two or three minutes. Cloudflare copies the store into your GitHub, creates the storage the admin needs, builds it, and gives you an address ending .workers.dev. That is your store, live, on the internet. At the bottom of the page, Run this store is the admin; type the password and it asks you for your Stripe key right there.

When it goes wrong

“Cloudflare could not create the Git repository”

That project name is already taken in your GitHub account. Change the name and press Deploy again. Nothing is broken.

It deployed, but the store says checkout isn’t connected

Open your-address/admin, sign in, and open Setup. It checks the store in plain words and names whatever is wrong, with the fix in the same row: paste the key again, and it tells you at once if it’s the wrong one.

I pasted the wrong Stripe key

You can’t, quite: the store checks a key with Stripe before it keeps it, and says what was wrong. Paste the right one in the same row.

I don’t want to do this part myself

You don’t have to. The agent prompts hand the whole job to a coding assistant, and it will ask you for exactly these same three things.

I want to stop and come back later

Close the Cloudflare tab. Nothing is half-made, nothing is charged. The one-hour checklist is printable if you’d rather do it on paper first.

After it’s live

Three things, in this order, and none of them is urgent. In the admin’s Setup, paste your Stripe test key and the contact email; the store connects itself to Stripe. Put your own products in, from your phone or your Shopify export, and remove the sample ones in one tap. Then, only when you’re ready to take real money, paste the live key in the same row and buy something yourself with a real card to see it work end to end.

Open Cloudflare in a new tabBack to the stepsThe long version

Written by a fan.No affiliate links; nobody here is paid by Cloudflare, GitHub or Stripe.Stuck on something this page doesn’t cover? Tell us and it gets added.