Wrangler

Cloudflare official CLI for Workers/Pages/KV/R2/D1/Queues — free with Cloudflare account

Wrangler

Role

Cloudflare’s official CLI for every Worker in the family — the umbrella api.oriz.in Hono Worker per hono-worker-api-umbrella, the s.oriz.in shortener Worker, the og.oriz.in Satori endpoint, plus per-site Pages Functions where used.

Two modes:

• Local mode (wrangler dev) — runs the Worker in a local workerd instance with miniflare-emulated bindings (KV / R2 / D1 / Queues / Durable Objects). HMR on file change.
• Remote mode (wrangler dev --remote) — runs the Worker on real Cloudflare infrastructure with the actual production bindings. Required for behaviour-parity testing against real KV / R2 / Queues semantics.

Plus deploy (wrangler deploy), tail (wrangler tail), secret management (wrangler secret put), KV / R2 / D1 / Queues admin sub-commands.

Free tier

• Unlimited CLI usage as part of the Cloudflare free Workers plan (100,000 requests/day) — Wrangler itself doesn’t bill; it’s the operator surface for the underlying Worker plan.
• Local mode uses zero Cloudflare-side quota; runs entirely on the developer machine.
• Remote mode consumes the same 100K/day Worker request envelope as production traffic — covered by the CF Worker quota mitigation playbook.

Card / subscription required?

NO. Free as part of the Cloudflare account. Cloudflare R2 remains rejected on adjacent-paid-feature card-on-file grounds — Wrangler the CLI is fine; the Workers Paid plan it can also deploy to is what’s avoided.

Install + use

pnpm add -D wrangler@latest
pnpm wrangler login          # browser-auth into the CF account

# Local dev (workerd)
pnpm wrangler dev --port 8787

# Remote dev (real Cloudflare)
pnpm wrangler dev --remote

# Deploy
pnpm wrangler deploy

# Tail production logs
pnpm wrangler tail

# Secrets — pulled from Doppler per secrets-management-doppler
doppler secrets download --no-file --format env | \
  while IFS='=' read -r k v; do
    echo "$v" | pnpm wrangler secret put "$k"
  done

Pinned major version per rules/always-latest-deps; upgraded by Dependabot per code-quality-five-tools.

Why this is our pick

• Official. No third-party Worker CLI is as well-supported for the actual edge runtime; alternatives (denoflare, cloudflare-cli) lag behind Cloudflare’s own platform releases.
• Local + remote parity in one tool — no separate “test against real bindings” workflow.
• Free + no card — fits the family’s no-card-on-file and no-subscriptions rules.
• Composes with Cloudflare Tunnel — wrangler dev --port 8787 + cloudflared tunnel run --url http://localhost:8787 dev-oriz exposes the in-flight Worker on dev.oriz.in for webhook senders.

Alternatives

• Miniflare (standalone) — lower-level emulator that Wrangler now embeds; no reason to use directly when Wrangler is the same engine plus the deploy surface.
• denoflare — Deno-based Cloudflare Worker CLI; trails the platform on new bindings. Rejected.
• wrangler v1 — legacy; Cloudflare deprecated it. Wrangler v3+ is mandatory.

Swap cost

High — Wrangler is tightly coupled to the Cloudflare Workers runtime + binding API. Swapping the CLI without swapping the runtime is impossible; swapping the runtime would mean abandoning Cloudflare Workers entirely (Vercel Edge / Deno Deploy / fly.io) which fights hono-worker-api-umbrella and the broader CF stack lock.

Configuration files

• wrangler.toml (or wrangler.jsonc) — per-Worker config with name, main, compatibility_date, [vars], [[kv_namespaces]], [[r2_buckets]], [[queues.producers]] / [[queues.consumers]], etc.
• .dev.vars — local-dev secrets (gitignored). Production secrets go via wrangler secret put from Doppler per secrets-management-doppler.

Cross-refs

• Local dev tunneling decision
• Cloudflare Tunnel — pairs with Wrangler for webhook testing
• Dev-tools index
• Cloudflare Workers — runtime Wrangler deploys to
• Hono Worker API umbrella
• CF Worker quota mitigation playbook
• Secrets management — Doppler
• Use pnpm rule
• No card-on-file rule

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