Cloudflare ddclient Guide

How to update Cloudflare DNS with ddclient

I had a need to use DNS for a personal project and went down the rabbit hole of dynamic DNS. Instead of using a DDNS provider, I settled on hosting a zone in Cloudflare and using ddclient to keep a record up-to-date.

I found some stuff online about using ddclient with Cloudflare but it took some hacking to get everything working.

Gotchas Discovered

• Cloudflare deprecated the API that ddclient originally used.
• The version of ddclient in the ubuntu focal repo (3.8.3) still uses Cloudflare's deprecated API. To get the latest version, you have to install ddclient from Github.

Setup

It's assumed the reader has a Cloudflare account and a DNS zone.

1. Create the DNS record you want to manage with ddclient.
2. Create a Cloudflare API token using the Edit Zone DNS template. For Zone Resources select All zones. ref
3. Clone this repo.

git clone https://github.com/alexcreek/cloudflare-ddclient-guide.git ddclient
cd ddclient

4. Update the following in ddclient.conf.
   • password=
   • zone=
   • RECORD_TO_UPDATE
5. Start the ddclient container.

docker-compose up -d

Validation

Check ddlient's logs for SUCCESS messages.

docker-compose logs -f ddclient should yield:

SUCCESS:  $record -- Updated Successfully to $ip

Troubleshooting

• To enable verbose logging, in ddclient.conf set verbose=yes then run docker-compose restart ddclient to restart the container.
• To execute commands from the project's troubleshooting docs, open a shell in the container by running docker-compose exec ddclient bash