Hot damn...
> Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.
Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone.
This is going to be amazing for things like PR previews and code review. Being able to deploy a preview to a working URL for free is a huge reduction in friction.
I hope it doesn't get abused so much that they turn it off again.
I just tried this out:
% npx wrangler deploy --temporary
wrangler 4.103.0
────────────────────
You must accept Cloudflare's Terms of Service (https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/) and Privacy Policy (https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/) in order to continue. By typing "yes", you agree to these terms. Type "yes" to continue. … yes
Solving proof-of-work challenge…
Temporary account ready:
Account: Educated Celery (created)
Claim within: 60 minutes
Claim URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/claim-preview?claimToken=CAVe7LzWiGad737MYq-XrH8s6CebKM7-tE-rjuZBKAs
Total Upload: 13.79 KiB / gzip: 4.12 KiB
Uploaded cloudflare-redirect-resolver (2.27 sec)
Deployed cloudflare-redirect-resolver triggers (0.50 sec)
https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers.dev
Current Version ID: 5c12da7f-2749-4ccc-a8f6-79b85da98d10
I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am, but it did work -
https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers... will be live for the next 59 minutes.
Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder.
Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.
I had similar thoughts: "let's convince everyone to outsource the decision on who can access their websites to us, because BOTS BOTS BOTS" and "let's make life easier for bots to do things".
First you spread the disease, then you sell the cure.
But think of the shareholders
Anyone can be a shareholder.
If eastdakota/jgc are here.
- simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.
- You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store). These aren't considered "lockin".
- workers is "lockin" - not similar enough to lambda/cloud functions and so becomes CF specific.
Not having a simple container based compute piece has made me hesitate in taking up CF. (Fly or firebase won out)
>Not having a simple container based compute piece made me hesitate in taking up CF
Agreed. I wish CF had something like Azure's new fast-starting Express containers.
Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content. From elsewhere in their documentation, “Cloudflare limits how quickly you can create temporary preview accounts. If the Wrangler CLI cannot create an account because too many temporary preview accounts were requested too quickly, wait before retrying or authenticate the CLI with a permanent Cloudflare account,” and “Cloudflare applies additional abuse prevention checks to temporary preview accounts.”[1] This is a bit vague though. Creating a new account has never been a huge hurdle to overcome but this seems to reduce the barrier to entry even more.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/claim-dep...
> Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content
If it helps laugh DDoS attacks they would be incentivized to do the exact opposite. They can charge more for “protection” then.
Wouldn't it make more sense to merge the temporary account into an existing one, instead of claiming it as a new account?
This could lead to people having a large amount of separate accounts.
I assumed that's how it works if you sign in before claiming the account?
It says to claim you can either sign up or sign in.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Cloudflare still not have a "Create Account" button on the account listing page? I think you still have to sign up from scratch doing plus-code email tricks, then invite your original email address as an admin, juggling multiple accounts. They should consider fixing that first.
If I want to onboard a client to Cloudflare, I have to ask them to create an account and then invite me, which is a lot of friction for non-technical people.
A “create account” button accessible to me would be so much better. Then, I create the account and invite the client to join as owner.
I know no one is writing copy anymore but i wish they tried to edit it a bit so it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. It just sours the product when it seems like so little effort was put into the message. And it’s not even hard - just change the prompt used!
I’m going to need a wrapper for all these services offering this service.