> Tell us your hopes and dreams for a Cloudflare-wide CLI
It'd be great if the Wrangler CLI could display the required API token permissions upfront during local dev, so you know exactly what to provision before deploying. Even better if there were something like a `cf permissions check` command that tells you what's missing or unneeded perms with an API key.
Wonderful post and I will be taking inspiration from it. Surprised not to see TypeSpec https://typespec.io/ mentioned, which is a TypeScript-like schema language that I like to describe as "what if OpenAPI was good". I'm guessing they considered it and decided building their own would be both simpler and more flexible. The cost of BYO has come down a lot thanks to agents.
Love TypeSpec, agree it makes writing OpenAPI really easy.
But I’ve moved to using https://aep.dev style APIs as much as possible (sometimes written with TypeSpec), because the consistency allows you to use prebaked aepcli or very easily write your own since everything behaves like know “resources” with a consistent pattern.
Also Terraform works out of the box, with no needing to write a provider.
Ironically, with the advent of AI agents and stuff, we're going back from "checkbox engineering" in GUI webpages to CLI tools. Every time I need to clear cache in cloudflare when I upload a new version of an asset, I have to click through a bunch of things. Would be nice to just message my openclaw agent to do it.
> You can try the technical preview today by running npx cf. Or you can install it globally by running npm install -g cf.
A couple of obvious questions - Is it open source (npmjs side doesn't point to repo)? And in general will it be available as a single binary instead of requiring nodejs tooling to install/use? If so, using recently-acquired Bun or another product/approach?
The restish tool by the author of Huma is functionally correct, but I'm finding the models are not doing a great job at inferring the syntax. Admittedly I am having a hard time following the syntax too.
Finally. Jumping between wrangler, the dashboard, and raw API calls has been annoying for a while. I'm keen on the local explorer most, debugging Workers locally has always been clunky. Anyone know how this plays with Terraform-managed infra?
I'm happy that there will be more tooling, but the reason for that (and the target audience) should not be ai agents. It should be a good experience for humans!
Tools should be tested and quality assured. Something that was utterly missing for cloudflare's unusable v5 terraform provider.
Quality over quantity with a ux that has humans in mind!
Exactly! Number of turns, average tokens to achieve a task using your CLI, as well as average number of characters being returned per CLI command alongside other metrics: all important to both users and agents! I am working on allowing to accurately capture this at www.cliwatch.com! Feel free to request an example eval suite for a list of tasks you want to achieve with your CLI
I just wish they'd fix billing notifications. The ux makes it impossible to set it up. Been complaining about that on X, got a couple people saying they would look into it, even one that gave me his email address. Pure silence.
> We write a lot of TypeScript at Cloudflare. It’s the lingua franca of software engineering.
This scares me more than Im able to admit, typescript sucks and in my opinion its way worse than the more commonly used lingua franca of computing, which I would attribute to C. At least C can be used to create shared objects i guess?
I used to dislike JavaScript a lot after learning it and PHP, then using languages like C#. Then TypeScript came along making JS much easier to live with, but has actually become quite nice in some ways.
If you use deno as your default runtime, it's almost Go-like in its simplicity when you don't need much. Simple scripts, piping commands into the REPL, built-in linting, testing, etc. It's not that bad!
Of course you're welcome to your opinion and we'd likely agree about a lot of what's wrong with it, but I guess I feel a bit more optimistic about TS lately. The runtime is improving, they've got great plans for it, it's actually happening, and LLMs aren't bad at using it either. It's a decent default for me.
You look at libraries like Effect, and it's genuinely incredible work, but you can't help feeling like... Man, so many languages partially address these problems with first-class primitives and control flow tooling.
I'm grateful for their work and it's an awesome project, but it's a clear reflection of the deficiencies in the language and runtime.
I think it sucks because it transpiles to JavaScript and is an interpreted language. Users have to resolve the dependencies themselves and have the correct runtime. I definitely prefer my CLI tools be written in a compiled language with a single binary.
I agree, though one cool thing arriving lately (albeit with some major shortcomings) is the ability to compile binaries with deno or bun (and nodejs experimentally, I think).
With Go you can compile binaries with bindings for other binaries, like duckdb or sqlite or so on. With deno or bun, you're out of luck. It's such a drag. Regardless, it's been quite useful at my work to be able to send CLI utilities around and know they'll 'just work'. I maintain a few for scientific data processing and gardening (parsing, analysis, cleaning, etc) which is why the lack of duckdb bundling is such a thorn. I do wish I could use Go instead and pack everything directly into the binary.
Personally I haven't felt like Typescript has bought me enough over JavaScript to use it in contexts that I don't have to. I have to use TypeScript for work, and it's "fine", but I guess I haven't found that it helps all that much.
I'm not sure why; I guess it's because the web itself is already really flexible that I find that the types don't really buy me a lot since I have to encode that dynamism into it.
To be clear, before I get a lecture on type safety and how wonderful you think types are and how they should be in everything: I know. I like types in most languages. I didn't finish but I was doing a PhD in formal methods, and specifically in techniques to apply type safety to temporal logic. I assure you that I have heard all your reasoning for types before.
> Tell us your hopes and dreams for a Cloudflare-wide CLI
It'd be great if the Wrangler CLI could display the required API token permissions upfront during local dev, so you know exactly what to provision before deploying. Even better if there were something like a `cf permissions check` command that tells you what's missing or unneeded perms with an API key.
Wonderful post and I will be taking inspiration from it. Surprised not to see TypeSpec https://typespec.io/ mentioned, which is a TypeScript-like schema language that I like to describe as "what if OpenAPI was good". I'm guessing they considered it and decided building their own would be both simpler and more flexible. The cost of BYO has come down a lot thanks to agents.
Love TypeSpec, agree it makes writing OpenAPI really easy.
But I’ve moved to using https://aep.dev style APIs as much as possible (sometimes written with TypeSpec), because the consistency allows you to use prebaked aepcli or very easily write your own since everything behaves like know “resources” with a consistent pattern.
Also Terraform works out of the box, with no needing to write a provider.
Which parts of Openapi does it fix?
Ironically, with the advent of AI agents and stuff, we're going back from "checkbox engineering" in GUI webpages to CLI tools. Every time I need to clear cache in cloudflare when I upload a new version of an asset, I have to click through a bunch of things. Would be nice to just message my openclaw agent to do it.
> You can try the technical preview today by running npx cf. Or you can install it globally by running npm install -g cf.
A couple of obvious questions - Is it open source (npmjs side doesn't point to repo)? And in general will it be available as a single binary instead of requiring nodejs tooling to install/use? If so, using recently-acquired Bun or another product/approach?
I can't find any repository, either, but the package is listed as MIT-licensed and includes source maps, so I assume it will be published soon.
BTW Speakeasy support generating customizable CLIs written in Go from OpenAPI specs. https://www.speakeasy.com/docs/cli-generation/create-cli
(Disclaimer: I work for Speakeasy)
I have been experimenting with Open API spect -> CLI too. I have Go and specs auto-generated either with Huma or Fuego
https://github.com/danielgtaylor/huma https://github.com/go-fuego/fuego
The restish tool by the author of Huma is functionally correct, but I'm finding the models are not doing a great job at inferring the syntax. Admittedly I am having a hard time following the syntax too.
https://github.com/rest-sh/restish
I need to do proper evals, but it makes me wonder if `curl` or a CLI with more standard args / opts parsing will work better.
Thanks to Cloudflare for sharing their notes, anyone else figure this out?
I wish there were CLI preview command when making changes in Cloudflare.
I have few domains on Cloudflare and when making some changes, I wish there were a way to apply the same changes to multiple domains for consistency.
CLI preview for UI action will make it possible.
Finally. Jumping between wrangler, the dashboard, and raw API calls has been annoying for a while. I'm keen on the local explorer most, debugging Workers locally has always been clunky. Anyone know how this plays with Terraform-managed infra?
Oh yes to this! I spent yesterday morning working this out when it smacked me in the face
I’ve used a lot of cloudflare functionality with Claude and their API. Worked very good
Its so depressing that it took widespread LLM psychosis to finally get company leadership to invest in actual CLI tooling.
No, the customers never mattered but the mythical "LLM agent" is vitally important to cater too.
I'm happy that there will be more tooling, but the reason for that (and the target audience) should not be ai agents. It should be a good experience for humans!
Tools should be tested and quality assured. Something that was utterly missing for cloudflare's unusable v5 terraform provider. Quality over quantity with a ux that has humans in mind!
Making a good experience for AI agents also makes a good experience for the humans that are tasked with the management of their agents.
Exactly! Number of turns, average tokens to achieve a task using your CLI, as well as average number of characters being returned per CLI command alongside other metrics: all important to both users and agents! I am working on allowing to accurately capture this at www.cliwatch.com! Feel free to request an example eval suite for a list of tasks you want to achieve with your CLI
> Tell us your hopes and dreams for a Cloudflare-wide CLI
Please call it flare.
Excellente!
This, but for Bunny DNS, so I can get closer to 100% European clouds. :)
Complete CLI coverage is so great to see.
I just wish they'd fix billing notifications. The ux makes it impossible to set it up. Been complaining about that on X, got a couple people saying they would look into it, even one that gave me his email address. Pure silence.
> Right now, cf provides commands for just a small subset of Cloudflare products.
Why didn't they vibe code support for more? With this on the heels of EmDash, and this being a technical preview, it feels inconsistent.
> We write a lot of TypeScript at Cloudflare. It’s the lingua franca of software engineering.
This scares me more than Im able to admit, typescript sucks and in my opinion its way worse than the more commonly used lingua franca of computing, which I would attribute to C. At least C can be used to create shared objects i guess?
Why do you think it sucks?
I used to dislike JavaScript a lot after learning it and PHP, then using languages like C#. Then TypeScript came along making JS much easier to live with, but has actually become quite nice in some ways.
If you use deno as your default runtime, it's almost Go-like in its simplicity when you don't need much. Simple scripts, piping commands into the REPL, built-in linting, testing, etc. It's not that bad!
Of course you're welcome to your opinion and we'd likely agree about a lot of what's wrong with it, but I guess I feel a bit more optimistic about TS lately. The runtime is improving, they've got great plans for it, it's actually happening, and LLMs aren't bad at using it either. It's a decent default for me.
Not OP, I use TS but only because it’s the only option. TS is a build your own typing sandbox, more than enough rope to hang yourself.
Coming from typing systems that are opinionated, first class citizens of their languages, it doesn’t stand up.
This is one of my dislikes as well.
You look at libraries like Effect, and it's genuinely incredible work, but you can't help feeling like... Man, so many languages partially address these problems with first-class primitives and control flow tooling.
I'm grateful for their work and it's an awesome project, but it's a clear reflection of the deficiencies in the language and runtime.
I think it sucks because it transpiles to JavaScript and is an interpreted language. Users have to resolve the dependencies themselves and have the correct runtime. I definitely prefer my CLI tools be written in a compiled language with a single binary.
I agree, though one cool thing arriving lately (albeit with some major shortcomings) is the ability to compile binaries with deno or bun (and nodejs experimentally, I think).
With Go you can compile binaries with bindings for other binaries, like duckdb or sqlite or so on. With deno or bun, you're out of luck. It's such a drag. Regardless, it's been quite useful at my work to be able to send CLI utilities around and know they'll 'just work'. I maintain a few for scientific data processing and gardening (parsing, analysis, cleaning, etc) which is why the lack of duckdb bundling is such a thorn. I do wish I could use Go instead and pack everything directly into the binary.
“Typescript sucks” is not really a great reason.
Personally I haven't felt like Typescript has bought me enough over JavaScript to use it in contexts that I don't have to. I have to use TypeScript for work, and it's "fine", but I guess I haven't found that it helps all that much.
I'm not sure why; I guess it's because the web itself is already really flexible that I find that the types don't really buy me a lot since I have to encode that dynamism into it.
To be clear, before I get a lecture on type safety and how wonderful you think types are and how they should be in everything: I know. I like types in most languages. I didn't finish but I was doing a PhD in formal methods, and specifically in techniques to apply type safety to temporal logic. I assure you that I have heard all your reasoning for types before.
Well it does suck for a huge list of reasons but specifically disqualifying for being the lingua franca would be it being controlled by microsoft
It's open source. If Microsoft did anything weird it would be immediately forked ala. terraform, ElasticSearch etc.
There's so much momentum behind it from the front-end community alone it's not going anywhere.
IMO using Typescript sucks because of the node ecosystem/npm. The language itself is passable.
Well it does suck, and it isn't really great for implementing performant developer tools, such as parsers, formatters and so on.
The performance is that bad that the typescript developers are rewriting the language itself in Go. [0]
Tells me everything I need to know about how bad typescript is from a performance stand point.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...
That’s the lsp not runtime. Bun runs Typescript very fast. It’s a fantastic language and ecosystem.
I’ve just checked FFI in bun and it’s marked as experimental. There are great libraries in C/C++ world and FFI is kinda table stakes to use them.
No where did I say "runtime". Even with that it's because of Zig, not TypeScript and that only proves my point even more.