Cloudflare Has a Free API — DNS, Analytics, and CDN Management Without the Dashboard

#devops #api #tutorial #webdev

Cloudflare API Is Surprisingly Powerful

Cloudflare free plan includes API access to DNS management, analytics, cache purging, and more. No paid plan needed for most operations.

Setup

import requests

API_TOKEN = "your_cloudflare_api_token"
HEADERS = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_TOKEN}", "Content-Type": "application/json"}
BASE = "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4"

Create a token at dash.cloudflare.com/profile/api-tokens.

List All Zones (Domains)

def list_zones():
    r = requests.get(f"{BASE}/zones", headers=HEADERS)
    zones = r.json()["result"]
    return [{"name": z["name"], "id": z["id"], "status": z["status"]} for z in zones]

for z in list_zones():
    print(f"{z[name]} ({z[status]}) — {z[id]}")

Manage DNS Records

def list_dns(zone_id):
    r = requests.get(f"{BASE}/zones/{zone_id}/dns_records", headers=HEADERS)
    return [{"type": d["type"], "name": d["name"], "content": d["content"]}
            for d in r.json()["result"]]

def add_dns(zone_id, record_type, name, content):
    data = {"type": record_type, "name": name, "content": content, "ttl": 1}
    r = requests.post(f"{BASE}/zones/{zone_id}/dns_records", 
                      headers=HEADERS, json=data)
    return r.json()["success"]

# Add an A record
add_dns("zone_id", "A", "api.example.com", "1.2.3.4")

Purge Cache

def purge_cache(zone_id, urls=None):
    if urls:
        data = {"files": urls}
    else:
        data = {"purge_everything": True}
    r = requests.post(f"{BASE}/zones/{zone_id}/purge_cache",
                      headers=HEADERS, json=data)
    return r.json()["success"]

# Purge specific URLs
purge_cache("zone_id", ["https://example.com/style.css"])

# Purge everything
purge_cache("zone_id")

Get Analytics

def get_analytics(zone_id):
    r = requests.get(f"{BASE}/zones/{zone_id}/analytics/dashboard",
                     headers=HEADERS, params={"since": "-1440"})
    data = r.json()["result"]["totals"]
    return {
        "requests": data["requests"]["all"],
        "bandwidth": data["bandwidth"]["all"],
        "threats": data["threats"]["all"],
        "pageviews": data["pageviews"]["all"]
    }

Real Use Cases

Automated deployments — purge cache after deploy
Dynamic DNS — update A records for home servers
Multi-site management — manage dozens of domains from one script
Monitoring — track bandwidth and threat trends
Disaster recovery — quickly switch DNS in an incident

Free Plan API Limits

1200 API calls per 5 minutes
All DNS operations included
Analytics, cache purge, firewall rules
Workers (100K requests/day free)

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