Backend Workers experiment added and removed; Render chosen instead

Maison-Retail-Management-International/mike tried running the Express backend on Cloudflare Workers, confirmed it doesn't work (LibreOffice dependency), and landed on Render. Four commits, near-zero net change.

infrastructure

Commit 68228ef added a backend/wrangler.jsonc and a stub backend/src/worker.ts to get Cloudflare Workers Builds to accept the backend directory. The worker itself only answered /health; everything else returned 501. The commit message says plainly that "Full Mike API (Express + LibreOffice) is not available on this Worker." It was scaffolding, not a real backend.

38d65172 reverses it entirely. wrangler.jsonc, worker.ts, and wrangler ^4.90.0 as a devDependency are all removed. The backend stays Express with R2 storage and runs on Render.

The two frontend env edits track the decision: NEXT_PUBLIC_API_BASE_URL went from localhost:3001 to mike-backend...workers.dev (afdb3d2), then to https://mike-cuui.onrender.com (bf8d6a2) once Render won.

Nothing to import from these commits. The surviving code is identical to the starting point.

So what Skip unless you're evaluating Workers as a Node host and want a concrete data point. The blocker is LibreOffice - Express + LibreOffice can't run in a Worker sandbox. If your backend has similar native dependencies, this confirms the constraint without you having to test it yourself.

Spotted something wrong? Or know the PR text has fresher detail than the writeup above?

Commits in this thread

4 commits from Maison-Retail-Management-International/mike, oldest first. Source extracted verbatim from the harvested git log.

SHA	Subject	Author	Date
`afdb3d2b`	Point production frontend at mike-backend Workers URL.	Thomas GUILLEMAUD	2026-05-20	↗ GitHub
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
`68228ef0`	Add wrangler config and health Worker for mike-backend deploys.	Thomas GUILLEMAUD	2026-05-20	↗ GitHub
Cloudflare Workers Builds failed without wrangler.jsonc. This enables deploy and /health; full Express API still requires a Node host. Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
`38d65172`	Remove Cloudflare Worker setup from backend; API runs on Render.	Thomas GUILLEMAUD	2026-05-20	↗ GitHub
Drop wrangler.jsonc, placeholder worker.ts, and wrangler devDependency. Backend remains Express + R2 (S3 API); frontend stays on Workers. Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
`bf8d6a22`	Point production frontend API at Render backend URL.	Thomas GUILLEMAUD	2026-05-20	↗ GitHub
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>

SHA

Subject

Author

Date

afdb3d2b

Point production frontend at mike-backend Workers URL.

Thomas GUILLEMAUD

2026-05-20

↗ GitHub

Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>

68228ef0

Add wrangler config and health Worker for mike-backend deploys.

Thomas GUILLEMAUD

2026-05-20

↗ GitHub

Cloudflare Workers Builds failed without wrangler.jsonc. This enables
deploy and /health; full Express API still requires a Node host.

Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>

38d65172

Remove Cloudflare Worker setup from backend; API runs on Render.

Thomas GUILLEMAUD

2026-05-20

↗ GitHub

Drop wrangler.jsonc, placeholder worker.ts, and wrangler devDependency.
Backend remains Express + R2 (S3 API); frontend stays on Workers.

Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>

bf8d6a22

Point production frontend API at Render backend URL.

Thomas GUILLEMAUD

2026-05-20

↗ GitHub

Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>

Capture this thread into my fork

Download a single Markdown prompt that tells Claude how to port every commit above into your working tree — adapting paths and structure to match your repo. Run it via claude -p < capture-thread-558.md from inside the repo you want the changes in.