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API Definition and Developer Experience

19 posts · Sep 2011 – Sep 2026

What this trail covers

Cloudflare's API definition strategy has evolved to support gRPC over HTTP/2, enhancing security, reliability, and performance for gRPC APIs. This builds upon previous efforts to define APIs using JSON-REST and Protocol Buffers. The CLI tooling is being unified under a new schema-driven code generation pipeline to support all Cloudflare products, with a technical preview of `cf` and a new Local Explorer feature for local development. The new `cf` CLI is designed for agentic development, offering a fresh approach to generating SDKs, CLIs, docs, and libraries through an open-source, pluggable pipeline called Forge. Forge enables preview builds for every pull request, supports chaining of generation targets, and facilitates API versioning without breaking old clients. It aims to empower developers to own and control their API generation processes.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. Introducing cf: the agentic CLI for the entire Cloudflare APIIntroduced `cf`, a new agentic CLI that unifies access to over 3,000 Cloudflare API operations, significantly expanding beyond Wrangler's ~280 commands. `cf` defaults to JSON output for agent consumption, features a new TypeScript-based configuration format (`cloudflare.config.ts`) for improved type safety and programmatic configuration, and includes agent-centric command discovery via natural language search. It also integrates Vite for local development and provides a migration path from Wrangler configurations.
  2. Introducing Forge: the open source pipeline for generating SDKs, CLIs, docs, and moreIntroduced Forge, an open-source, pluggable code generation pipeline for SDKs, CLIs, and docs. Forge handles API changes at scale across multiple languages and repositories, generating preview builds for every pull request. It supports chaining of generation targets (e.g., generating CLIs from SDKs) and facilitates API versioning by releasing artifacts incrementally. Forge can generate various outputs from OpenAPI specifications, including Cap'n Web RPC systems, TanStack Query bindings, Zod schemas, and MCP servers.
  3. Building a CLI for all of CloudflareThis post introduces a new schema-driven code generation pipeline that uses TypeScript types to define APIs, CLI commands, and context, enabling the generation of various interfaces including OpenAPI schemas, SDKs, Terraform providers, and CLI commands. It also announces a technical preview of a unified CLI tool named `cf` (formerly Wrangler) and the open beta release of Local Explorer, a feature for introspecting and managing simulated local resources (KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Workflows) used by Workers during local development.
  4. Code Mode: give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokensIntroduced a new MCP server that provides access to the entire Cloudflare API using Code Mode. This server exposes only two tools, `search()` and `execute()`, which allow AI agents to discover and interact with thousands of API endpoints while consuming minimal context window tokens. The server utilizes Dynamic Workers for secure code execution and is open-sourced, along with a Code Mode SDK.
  5. Lessons from building an automated SDK pipelineThis post details the transition to using OpenAPI schemas to automatically generate SDKs for TypeScript, Go, and Python. The previous manual maintenance process was time-consuming and led to inconsistencies. The new approach uses Stainless, an SDK generation platform, to map OpenAPI schemas to SDK methods, ensuring language-agnostic generation, uniform namespace and method construction, and enabling linting rules (e.g., for API token authentication and description formatting) to enforce API design conventions during the CI process.
  7. Query Cloudflare Radar and our docs using ChatGPT pluginsThis post introduces two new ChatGPT plugins: one for Cloudflare Radar and one for Cloudflare Docs. The Radar plugin leverages an OpenAPI specification to allow natural language queries about internet patterns. The Docs plugin uses a retrieval-based approach with embeddings stored in KV to provide up-to-date documentation information to ChatGPT. Both plugins are built on Cloudflare Workers and showcase how OpenAPI definitions and advanced data handling can be used to integrate Cloudflare services with emerging AI platforms, significantly enhancing developer experience and access to information.
  8. Automatically discovering API endpoints and generating schemas using machine learningIntroduced machine learning-based API Discovery to automatically identify all API endpoints without requiring customer input like session identifiers. Developed Schema Learning to automatically generate OpenAPI schemas for discovered endpoints, enabling real-time schema validation and positive security model enforcement.
  9. Keeping the Cloudflare API 'all green' using Python-based testingIntroduced Scout, a Python-based automated testing system leveraging Pytest and OpenAPI schemas to verify the end-to-end behavior of Cloudflare's APIs. Scout addresses limitations of previous systems by enabling easier JSON response matching, request validation against OpenAPI schemas, parallel test execution, and environment-specific testing. It consists of a Pytest plugin for writing tests, a scheduler service for periodic execution, and a worker for reporting test results.
  10. Iteration isn't just for code: here are our latest API docsThis post details the technical implementation of Cloudflare's new API documentation site, which leverages the OpenAPI specification and Stoplight Elements. The site is built and deployed using Cloudflare Pages with Pages Functions to optimize and cache OpenAPI schema files. This approach allows for dynamic updates to documentation when schema files in GitHub are modified, ensuring consistency between API definitions and their documentation without requiring full site redeployments. The use of OpenAPI standardizes API content and enables the use of numerous code generation and documentation tools.
  11. The Cloudflare API now uses OpenAPI schemasThis post announces the general availability of OpenAPI Schemas for the Cloudflare API, replacing the previous JSON Hyper-Schema. It details the benefits of OpenAPI for internal API maintenance and external tooling, including accelerated development through mocking (Stoplight Prism) and library generation (openapi-generator). The post also describes the automated conversion process from JSON Hyper-Schema to OpenAPI and the launch of new API documentation leveraging Stoplight Elements.
  12. API Endpoint Management and Metrics are now GAThis post announces the General Availability (GA) of API Endpoint Management and Metrics within API Shield. Key contributions include: 1. GA of Endpoint Management: Allows saving, updating, and monitoring API endpoints, including manual addition and deletion. 2. GA of Performance Metrics: Provides real-time data on latency, error rate (4xx, 5xx), request count, and response size for API endpoints. 3. Enhanced API Discovery: Now accepts cookies as session identifiers in addition to authorization headers. 4. Schema Validation for Request Bodies: Enables validation of the request body against an OpenAPI schema.
  13. Cloudflare and StackBlitz partner to deliver an instant and secure developer experienceThis post announces a partnership with StackBlitz to integrate the Wrangler CLI experience into the browser using StackBlitz's WebContainers technology. This enables instant, dependency-free development environments for Cloudflare Workers, directly within the browser. It also highlights existing Wrangler improvements for running in any Node.js environment, including browsers. The post showcases new templates for Workers development and outlines future plans for full developer lifecycle support within the browser.
  14. Announcing the Cloudflare API GatewayThis post announces the Cloudflare API Gateway, a new product that packages several existing and new features to manage and secure APIs. Key components include Discovery (identifying API endpoints), Schema Validation (validating traffic against OpenAPI schemas), Abuse Detection (suggesting rate limits based on ML analysis), mTLS (mutual TLS for client certificate validation), Authentication (issuing and validating API keys, JWTs, OAuth 2.0 tokens), and Routing & Management (dynamic URL rewriting and routing for microservices). The post details the technical implementation and benefits of each component, highlighting how they leverage existing Cloudflare technologies like Workers, Bot Management, and Access.
  15. Landscape of API TrafficThis post quantifies the growth of API traffic, noting it now represents 54% of total requests and is growing twice as fast as traditional web traffic. It highlights the increasing adoption of APIs across industries like Banking, Retail, and Financial Services, driven by trends in application architecture (Jamstack, microservices, serverless), API-first business models, and the rise of connected devices. The post also analyzes API characteristics, such as the dominance of POST and GET methods (98% of traffic) and the widespread use of JSON for payloads (~97%), while noting XML handles larger payloads. It also mentions the increasing adoption of gRPC and QUIC.
  16. Bringing OAuth 2.0 to WranglerThis post introduces the implementation of the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Flow with PKCE challenges for the `wrangler login` command. This change replaces API token-based authentication for Wrangler, offering a more streamlined and secure user experience. Key technical details include the definition of OAuth 2.0 roles (Resource Owner, Resource Server, Client, Authorization Server), the Authorization Code Flow with PKCE, the use of CSRF states, and the management of short-lived access tokens and refresh tokens. The post also details how users can specify scopes for authorization and revoke access via `wrangler logout`.
  17. Road to gRPCThis post details the technical implementation of gRPC support on Cloudflare's edge. Key contributions include: 1. Implementing HTTP/2 gRPC to HTTP/1.1 gRPC-web conversion to work with existing HTTP/1.1 proxies. 2. Building a standalone HTTP/2 origin proxy to support gRPC origins. 3. Implementing bidirectional streaming support for gRPC. 4. Developing interoperability testing with Envoy and other gRPC implementations.
  18. Announcing support for gRPCThis post announces beta support for proxying gRPC traffic over HTTP/2. The engineering effort involved modifying the request processing pipeline to identify gRPC traffic, enhancing the WAF to understand and correctly handle gRPC connections, and adding support for establishing HTTP/2 connections to customer origins. This allows Cloudflare's existing security, reliability, and performance features to be applied to gRPC APIs.
  19. A New API Binding: cloudflare-phpThis post introduces the official cloudflare-php API binding, available via Packagist. It details design decisions made for the binding, including the exclusive use of PHP 7 for its type hinting features and the implementation of object composition and dependency injection for flexibility. The post also explains how PSR-7 is used for testing and mocking HTTP requests.
  20. Using Guzzle and PHPUnit for REST API TestingThis post introduces a method for automated REST API testing using PHP, Guzzle (HTTP client), and PHPUnit (testing framework). It details setting up the environment with Composer, configuring PHPUnit with `phpunit.xml`, and writing test cases for GET and PUT HTTP verbs against endpoints like httpbin.org/user-agent. The post demonstrates how to assert status codes, content types, and JSON response bodies, and provides a GitHub repository link for the complete code.
  21. CloudFlare's JSON-powered Documentation GeneratorThis post details the development of a toolchain for generating HTML documentation from JSON Schema files. It introduces json-schema-loader for resolving references, json-schema-example-loader for transforming schema structures to fit UI components, and doca for scaffolding applications. The use of Webpack loaders and React for themes is highlighted.
  22. python-cloudflareThis post introduces python-cloudflare, a Python wrapper providing full access to the Cloudflare v4 API. It details how the library mirrors the API structure, provides examples for common operations like listing zones and managing DNS records, and highlights the availability of a command-line interface (CLI) for interacting with the API. It also mentions the existence of client libraries for Go and Node.js.
  23. Sunsetting API v1 In Favor Of CloudFlare’s Current Client API: API v4This post announces the sunsetting of Cloudflare's API v1 in favor of API v4, effective November 9th, 2016. API v4 offers significantly expanded functionality, including management of Page Rules, SSL certificates, Railgun connections, custom error pages, analytics, firewall access rules (with IPv6, CIDR, ASN, and country support), mobile redirects, response buffering/streaming toggles, query string sorting, Polish, HSTS, TLS Client Auth settings, True-Client-IP header management, TLS 1.2 enforcement, Purge by Tag, zone management, user account management, billing history, and subscription management. It also introduces Multi-User support for Enterprise customers and Virtual DNS management. A key technical improvement is the consistent use of JSON for both requests and responses, simplifying data handling. The namespacing has also been made more human-readable, with examples like 'always_online' replacing 'ob'. Migration documentation and client libraries for Go, Python, and Node.js are provided.
  24. CloudFlare Tips: 5 Frequently used CloudFlare API callsThis post introduces the Cloudflare API as a means to programmatically control various aspects of the Cloudflare service, including development mode, cache purging, statistics retrieval, spam reporting, and challenge page customization. It provides essential prerequisites like API keys, zone IDs, and account email, and points to the Client Interface API documentation for detailed call parameters.