Cloudflare Introduces CLI for AI Agents, Sunsetting Wrangler
Cloudflare recently launched the open beta of cf, a new open-source, agent-focused command-line interface for interacting with Cloudflare services through a unified CLI. Written in TypeScript, it provides structured output and command discovery to make Cloudflare’s APIs easier for both developers and AI agents. By Renato Losio
Cloudflare has unveiled a new open-source command-line interface (CLI) called cf, designed to streamline interaction with its services through a unified CLI for both developers and AI agents. Written in TypeScript, cf offers structured output and command discovery, effectively avoiding compatibility issues that may have arisen from integrating with existing LLM-based tools like Wrangler.
Matt Taylor, a senior product manager at Cloudflare, and Samuel Macleod, a senior systems engineer at Cloudflare, revealed that Wrangler, previously used for command developer experience, was built separately by various product teams. Due to this, enforcing consistent terminology and practices across teams proved challenging. As a result, cf has been designed with agent-driven development in mind, featuring command discovery, optimized JSON output for humans and agents alike, and a new TypeScript-based configuration format.
The cf CLI aims to standardize existing functionalities while expanding to cover over 3000 API operations, significantly more than the roughly 280 functions available in Wrangler. By generating CLI commands directly from Cloudflare's API schema, Forge, Cloudflare's unified API generation pipeline, has made this possible.
Community reaction to the choice of TypeScript for a CLI has been mixed, with some questioning the need for a compiled language and its impact on startup time, portability, and dependency management. However, Cloudflare contends that TypeScript's type safety and Language Server Protocol (LSP) support facilitate configuration for both humans and agents, reducing the risk of duplication and improving accuracy in configuration understanding and modification.
Unlike Wrangler, which defaulted to table output, cf has opted for JSON as the default output format. This decision enables agents to easily filter and transform the data to meet the needs of human users, rather than relying on a format that may be less intuitive for parsing. Cloudflare plans to sunset Wrangler following the cf open beta, releasing a final major version of Wrangler and providing 18 months of maintenance support for users to transition to the new CLI.
Written by urgent.news from InfoQ's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
