Cloudflare Launches 'cf' CLI for Comprehensive API Access, Prioritizing AI Agents
Cloudflare introduces 'cf', a new open-beta CLI tool designed to provide agents and developers with access to the entire Cloudflare API, replacing the more limited Wrangler CLI.
Cloudflare has officially launched 'cf', a new command-line interface (CLI) tool now available in open beta, aimed at providing comprehensive access to its vast array of APIs. This move signifies a strategic pivot towards supporting the burgeoning use of AI agents in software development and operations, acknowledging their rapidly increasing adoption of CLI tools. The 'cf' CLI is engineered to cover the entirety of Cloudflare's API surface, encompassing over 3,000 operations, a significant expansion from the approximately 280 operations previously supported by the Wrangler CLI.
The development of 'cf' is a direct response to the observed trend of agentic workflows. Cloudflare noted that agent usage of its previous CLI, Wrangler, has "skyrocketed," accounting for nearly half of all usage in recent weeks. Agents are not only more prolific users, executing more commands daily, but also more likely to utilize a wider range of functionalities. Recognizing this shift, Cloudflare designed 'cf' from the ground up with agents in mind, incorporating features like bespoke search and steering for command discovery.
Key features of the 'cf' CLI include JSON as the default output format, which is pretty-printed for human readability and condensed for agents to maximize context savings. For configuration, 'cf' introduces cloudflare.config.ts, a new format leveraging TypeScript to bring enhanced safety and accuracy to configuration management, starting with Workers. This integration with TypeScript is expected to improve the developer experience through better language server protocol (LSP) support.
Furthermore, 'cf' adopts Vite as its default build tool, promising an improved local development server experience and a robust plugin suite for developers and framework authors. This integration aims to streamline the development workflow, making it more efficient for both human developers and AI agents.
The 'cf' CLI is built upon Cloudflare's new unified API generation pipeline, Forge. By leveraging OpenAPI schemas and additional annotations, Forge can generate CLI commands directly from the API specifications. This approach allows Cloudflare to rapidly expand the CLI's capabilities to cover thousands of operations, ensuring consistency and reducing manual development effort.
Cloudflare emphasizes that introducing a new CLI, rather than drastically altering Wrangler, offers a cleaner path forward. While Wrangler has the advantage of existing training data for LLMs, 'cf' provides a fresh start, enabling new design decisions and context injections that are less confusing for agents than adapting to major changes in a familiar tool. The company is providing specific guidance for updating agent instructions to prefer 'cf' over Wrangler for new projects.
Users can install the open beta of 'cf' globally via npm. Cloudflare encourages developers and agents to adopt 'cf' for managing Cloudflare resources, from setting up workers and deploying them to monitoring, observing, and protecting services with features like Cloudflare Access and WAF, all within a single, unified tool.
The introduction of 'cf' underscores Cloudflare's commitment to evolving its developer tools to meet the demands of modern software development, particularly the increasing reliance on AI agents for automation and complex task execution. This move aims to standardize and significantly expand command-line capabilities across the entire Cloudflare ecosystem.