DEV Community

Cover image for Vercel CLI DNS Commands: Manage Records Without the Dashboard
Umesh Malik
Umesh Malik

Posted on Originally published at umesh-malik.com

Vercel CLI DNS Commands: Manage Records Without the Dashboard

#vercel #cli #dns #developertooling

Vercel's dashboard is fine until you need to update DNS records for the third time in an hour, or you're scripting a deployment pipeline, or an AI agent needs to provision a subdomain. The new Vercel CLI DNS commands bring that work to the terminal where it belongs — record updates, domain renewals, and project management, all scriptable.

The Vercel CLI now supports full DNS record management, domain renewal, project state control, and team membership — all with JSON output for scripts and agents. This isn't a wrapper around the dashboard; it's the same API the dashboard calls, exposed where you can actually automate it.

TL;DR

  • vercel dns update modifies records by ID — name, type, value, TTL, MX priority, SRV fields, and comments.
  • vercel domains renew renews on demand with price confirmation; vercel domains set-auto-renew toggles automatic renewal.
  • vercel project pause/resume hibernates projects; vercel project analytics and vercel project speed-insights control observability.
  • All commands support --json for structured output and --yes for non-interactive confirmation.
  • Update with npm i -g vercel@latest — the commands ship in the current release.

Why the CLI matters now

Three things changed that make CLI-first DNS management worth adopting.

AI agents need it. If you're using Claude Code, Cursor, or any agent-driven workflow to manage infrastructure, those agents can't click through a dashboard. They need commands that return structured data. Every new Vercel CLI command outputs JSON when you ask for it, which means an agent can parse the response, make decisions, and continue — no browser automation, no screen scraping, no brittle hacks.

Scripts can finally be self-contained. Before this, automating Vercel DNS meant calling the REST API directly, which meant managing authentication tokens, parsing responses, and handling errors yourself. The CLI handles all of that. A deployment script can now create a subdomain, wait for propagation, and run a health check without leaving bash.

Batch operations are faster. Updating 20 DNS records through the dashboard takes 20 page loads and 40 clicks. Updating them through a loop in the terminal takes one script and a few seconds.

The Vercel CLI DNS commands

Inspecting records 

vercel dns ls example.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Lists all DNS records for a domain with their IDs, types, names, values, and TTLs. The ID is what you'll need for updates.

For a single record's full configuration:

vercel dns inspect <record-id>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Updating records 

vercel dns update <record-id> --value "192.0.2.1" --ttl 300
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

You can modify any combination of:

  • --name — the subdomain (or @ for apex)
  • --type — A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV, CAA
  • --value — the record value
  • --ttl — time-to-live in seconds
  • --priority — for MX records
  • --comment — internal notes visible only in Vercel

For SRV records, you also get --weight, --port, and --target.

Vercel CLI DNS update flow showing record ID lookup, update command, and verification cycle

Creating and deleting 

vercel dns add example.com @ A 192.0.2.1
vercel dns rm <record-id>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Creation takes the domain, name, type, and value as positional arguments. Deletion uses the record ID and asks for confirmation (skip with --yes).

Domain management

Renewal on demand 

vercel domains renew example.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The CLI fetches the current renewal price and shows it before asking for confirmation. You won't accidentally renew at a rate you didn't expect.

Auto-renewal control 

vercel domains set-auto-renew example.com on
vercel domains set-auto-renew example.com off
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Turning auto-renewal off is useful for domains you're planning to let expire or transfer. The dashboard buries this toggle; the CLI makes it explicit.

Checking domain status 

vercel domains inspect example.com --json
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Returns registration status, expiration date, nameserver configuration, and renewal settings in a format scripts can parse directly.

Project commands

Pause and resume 

vercel project pause my-project
vercel project resume my-project
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Pausing stops serving traffic — visitors get a holding page. This is useful for:

  • Staging environments you only need during active development
  • Cost control on projects with serverless functions that bill by invocation
  • Incident response when you need to take a project offline fast without deleting it

Project lifecycle diagram showing active, paused, and resumed states with CLI commands

Observability toggles 

vercel project analytics enable my-project
vercel project analytics disable my-project
vercel project speed-insights enable my-project
vercel project speed-insights disable my-project
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Web Analytics and Speed Insights could already be enabled from the CLI. Now they can be disabled too, which matters for scripts that set up and tear down environments.

Team membership 

vercel project members add my-project user@example.com --role developer
vercel project members rm my-project user@example.com
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Roles are owner, developer, or viewer. This is the part of Vercel administration that's most often done manually and most often forgotten — scripting it means onboarding and offboarding can be automated alongside your identity provider.

Using these in scripts

Every command supports --json for structured output:

vercel dns ls example.com --json | jq '.records[] | select(.type == "A")'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

For non-interactive use (CI/CD pipelines, agent loops), add --yes to skip confirmation prompts:

vercel dns rm "$RECORD_ID" --yes
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

A typical automation pattern:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

DOMAIN="staging.example.com"
IP=$(curl -s https://api.ipify.org)

RECORD_ID=$(vercel dns ls "$DOMAIN" --json | jq -r '.records[] | select(.name == "@" and .type == "A") | .id')

if [ -n "$RECORD_ID" ]; then
  vercel dns update "$RECORD_ID" --value "$IP" --yes
else
  vercel dns add "$DOMAIN" @ A "$IP"
fi

echo "DNS updated to $IP"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This pattern — inspect, decide, act — is exactly what AI agents do. The JSON output and explicit confirmation flags make the CLI agent-ready out of the box.

What to use when

Task Dashboard CLI
Exploring records you don't know the IDs for Better Works, but requires listing first
One-off record update Fine Faster if you know the ID
Batch updates (>3 records) Tedious Much faster
CI/CD integration Impossible Native
Agent-driven provisioning Impossible Native
Domain renewal Fine Same, with price shown inline
Project state control (pause/resume) Fine Faster, scriptable

The dashboard isn't going anywhere, and it's still the right tool for exploration and one-off changes where you want to see everything at once. The CLI is for repetition, automation, and anything that needs to happen without a human clicking through pages.

Getting started

Update to the latest CLI:

npm i -g vercel@latest
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Verify the new commands are available:

vercel dns --help
vercel domains --help
vercel project --help
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Authentication uses your existing Vercel login. If you're already authenticated (vercel whoami shows your account), you're ready to go.

For CI/CD environments, use a Vercel token with the VERCEL_TOKEN environment variable.

The bigger picture

This update is part of a broader trend: infrastructure management is moving from dashboards to commands because that's where automation lives. Cloudflare did this years ago with Wrangler (see deploying to Cloudflare Workers). AWS has always been CLI-first. Vercel catching up here means you can finally manage a Vercel-hosted project with the same scripting patterns you use for everything else.

For AI coding agents specifically, this is a prerequisite for autonomous infrastructure work. An agent that can deploy code but can't provision the DNS records pointing to it is only doing half the job. Now it can do both.

The Vercel CLI documentation has the full command reference. The DNS, domain, and project commands are available now in the current release.

Originally published at umesh-malik.com

Keep reading on umesh-malik.com:

Top comments (0)