Better Dynamic DNS for Your Home Lab or Self-Hosted Cloud

This is a cross-platform DDNS client for CloudFlare, written in Go. It makes multiple attemps to retrieve your public IP, first using DNS and then several public APIs. It is well tested with a full end-to-end test suite that actually verifies functionality against CloudFlare. It also has good logging so you can see it working in your system logs.

All it requires from you are your domain name, e.g. mydomain.com, your DNS record name, e.g. mydomain.com or sub.mydomain.com, and a CloudFlare API token with the permissions of Zone:Zone:Read and Zone:DNS:Edit.

cloudflare-ddns will attempt to resolve your public IP in the following order:

1. Using OpenDNS
2. Using Google DNS
3. Using http://whatismyip.akamai.com
4. Using https://ipecho.net/plain
5. Using https://wtfismyip.com/text

Running It

By passing in all required arguments:

$ cloudflare-ddns --domain mydomain.com --record sub.mydomain.com --token <cloudflare-api-token>
11:16PM INF Found external IP '97.113.235.123'
11:16PM INF DNS record 'sub.mydomain.com' is already set to IP '97.113.235.123'

If you have a config file set up (see below), no arguments are needed:

$ cloudflare-ddns
11:16PM INF Found external IP '97.113.235.123'
11:16PM INF DNS record 'sub.mydomain.com' is already set to IP '97.113.235.123'

With environment variables:

DOMAIN=mydomain.com RECORD=sub.mydomain.com TOKEN=<your-cloudflare-api-token> cloudflare-ddns
11:16PM INF Found external IP '97.113.235.123'
11:16PM INF DNS record 'sub.mydomain.com' is already set to IP '97.113.235.123'

Running with Docker

With a configuration file:

docker run --rm -v /path/to/cloudflare-ddns.conf:/etc/cloudflare-ddns.conf mattolenik/cloudflare-ddns-client

With environment variables:

docker run --rm -e DOMAIN=mydomain.com -e RECORD=sub.mydomain.com -e TOKEN=<your-cloudflare-api-token> mattolenik/cloudflare-ddns-client

Installation

As a Single Binary

cloudflare-ddns is distributed as a single binary with no dependencies. Simply download the correct binary for your OS under releases, rename it to cloudflare-ddns and place it in a convenient location such as /usr/local/bin.

If on Linux:

curl -sSLo /usr/local/bin/cloudflare-ddns $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/mattolenik/cloudflare-ddns-client/releases/latest | awk -F'"' '/browser_download_url.*linux-amd64/ {print $4}') && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cloudflare-ddns

If on macOS:

curl -sSLo /usr/local/bin/cloudflare-ddns $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/mattolenik/cloudflare-ddns-client/releases/latest | awk -F'"' '/browser_download_url.*darwin-amd64/ {print $4}') && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cloudflare-ddns

Docker

docker pull mattolenik/cloudflare-ddns-client

Ubuntu PPA

Coming soon.

MacOS HomeBrew

Coming soon.

Configuration

cloudflare-ddns can take configuration either through config file, command-line arguments, or environment variable. Use whichever method you feel is easiest for your use case. Be careful when passing in your CloudFlare API token as a CLI argument, it may be visible in logs if you are running the program from a cron job, systemd, etc.

Configuration File

Configuration can be provided in any of the formats supported by the viper configuration library, including JSON, YAML, and TOML.

Example TOML configuration file:

# Configuration for cloudflare-ddns, TOML format.

# The domain name that you own
domain = "example.com"

# The DNS record to update, may be a subdomain or the domain name itself
record = "subdomain.example.com"

# Your CloudFlare API token, must have permissions Zone:Zone:Read, Zone:DNS:Edit
token = "your-cloudflare-api-token-here"

Running Periodically with Cron

TBD

Running Periodically with systemd

TBD

Logging

cloudflare-ddns has decent informational logging. It will output logs to stderr. A verbose option, --verbose or -v can be set to print additional debugging logs.

It can also print logs in JSON for consumption by logging tools that process JSON. Just use the --json flag.

Command-Line Usage

A dynamic DNS client for CloudFlare. Automatically detects your public IP and
creates/updates a DNS record in CloudFlare.

Configuration flags can be set by defining an environment variable of the same name.
For example:
DOMAIN=mydomain.com RECORD=sub.mydomain.com TOKEN=<api-token> cloudflare-ddns

Usage:
  cloudflare-ddns [flags]

Flags:
      --config string   Path to config file (default is /etc/cloudflare-ddns.toml)
      --domain string   Domain name in CloudFlare, e.g. example.com
  -h, --help            help for cloudflare-ddns
      --json            Log format, either pretty or json, defaults to pretty
      --record string   DNS record name in CloudFlare, may be subdomain or same as domain
      --token string    CloudFlare API token with permissions Zone:Zone:Read and Zone:DNS:Edit
  -v, --verbose         Verbose logging, prints additional log output
      --version         version for cloudflare-ddns

Development

Running Tests

cloudflare-ddns has a suite of end-to-end tests that actually run the real program against a real CloudFlare account to verify functionality.

To run these tests, the following environment variables must be present at the time that make test is run:

• CLOUDFLARE_TOKEN an API token with the usual Zone:Zone:Read and Zone:DNS:Edit permissions
• TEST_DOMAIN the domain name in your CloudFlare account where the test records will be placed

When forking this repo you should store these as GitHub Secrets within your repository. The Actions test job will retrieve those secrets and populate the environment variables for you.

The tests will create new records and clean them up when finished.