Undo and rollback

How to unpublish an article, revert a mistake, restore a deleted file, and re-deploy after a problem.

Every change you make to a Project Broadsheet publication is a Git commit. That means every change is reversible.

Unpublish an article

You have two options depending on whether you want to keep the file.

Hide it with draft: true — the article stays in your repository but disappears from every index, feed, and sitemap:

---
title: My Article
draft: true
---

Delete the file — remove the Markdown file from src/content/. Git tracks the deletion. The article is removed from the next build. The URL returns a 404.

If readers have bookmarked the URL, consider leaving a redirect in place rather than a hard 404. Add a redirect rule in Cloudflare Pages under your project settings.

Revert a commit

If your last commit introduced a problem, the safest way to undo it is git revert. This creates a new commit that reverses the previous one — it does not rewrite history.

git revert HEAD
git push

Cloudflare Pages detects the push and rebuilds. Your live site is back to its previous state within 2–3 minutes.

git revert is safe because it adds to history rather than erasing it. Prefer it over git reset in almost every case.

Reset to an earlier state (destructive)

If you need to go back further than one commit, use git reset. This rewrites history and cannot be undone.

# Find the commit you want to go back to
git log --oneline

# Reset to that commit (keeps your files unchanged, unstages the commits)
git reset --soft <commit-hash>

# Or discard everything after that commit entirely
git reset --hard <commit-hash>

# Force push to update the remote
git push --force

Only use git reset --hard if you are certain you do not need the work you are discarding.

Restore a deleted file

If you accidentally deleted a file and have already committed the deletion:

# Find the commit before the deletion
git log --oneline -- src/content/news/my-article.md

# Restore the file from that commit
git checkout <commit-hash>^ -- src/content/news/my-article.md

# Commit the restoration
git add src/content/news/my-article.md
git commit -m "restore: recover my-article.md"
git push

Re-deploy after a mistake

Cloudflare Pages rebuilds automatically on every push. If a bad deploy made it to production:

1. Fix the problem locally
2. Commit and push the fix — Cloudflare builds immediately
3. If you need to roll back to a previous successful build, go to Cloudflare Pages → your project → Deployments → find a successful build → Rollback to this deployment

The Cloudflare rollback instantly serves the previous build without a new rebuild.

What to do next

• Build errors if your site is failing to build after a change.
• Deploy failures for Cloudflare-specific deployment problems.
• Drafts and scheduling for controlling article visibility without deleting content.