The Surge Platform
Surge is a web publishing platform built for front-end developers. You hand it a directory of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; it hands you back a production site on a global CDN. The CLI is how you drive it—this section documents what the platform itself does with your project once it's up.
What every project gets
Publish anything to Surge—free—and it comes with:
- A global CDN. Your files are propagated to edge nodes worldwide and served close to your visitors, with aggressive-but-correct caching applied automatically.
- Custom domain support. Publish to your own domain at no cost, with DNS managed by Surge or by your existing provider.
- SSL. Every
surge.shsubdomain is HTTPS out of the box; custom domains get free managed certificates viasurge encrypt. - Clean URLs.
/aboutservesabout.html, canonical redirects are handled, andwwwfolds into your root domain automatically. - Revisions. Every deploy is kept, previewable, and instantly restorable.
- Client-side routing for single-page apps, and custom 404 pages.
- Gzip, ETags, and far-future caching—applied for you, never configured.
Configuration is files in your project
The platform's conventions follow one idea: your project directory is the configuration. Behavior is controlled by files that deploy with your code:
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
CNAME |
Sets the project's domain. |
.surgeignore |
Excludes files from deployment. |
200.html |
Serves your app shell for unmatched URLs (SPA routing). |
404.html |
The not-found page (custom 404s). |
ROUTER |
Redirect rules (redirects). |
AUTH |
HTTP basic auth (password protection). |
CORS |
Cross-origin access (CORS). |
Because these travel with the deploy, every revision carries its own complete configuration—roll back the code and you roll back the behavior with it. The control files themselves (ROUTER, AUTH, CORS) are never served to visitors.
Free and paid
Publishing, custom domains, managed SSL, revisions, and the CDN are free. A paid plan adds the server-side features—password protection, redirects, CORS, custom certificates. See Plans.