5 ms·

Flares is a CloudFlare DNS backup tool

28 points by lfaoro 7y ago

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
I too enjoy taking my keys to the kingdom and piping a bash script with it to do stuff.
01emanresu 7y ago
Cool tool! But why would I use this over dnscontrol, Terraform or OctoDNS?
- mugsie 7y ago
  text/dns is a standard way to move DNS zones around - this means you can export this to a file, and possibly import it elsewhere, or just archive it as a point in time backup
mjlee 7y ago
If anybody from Cloudflare sees this - this is another good reason to add multiple API keys with permissions!
- jgrahamc 7y ago
  That's coming.
  - mjlee 7y ago
    Brilliant - looking forward to it!
  - stedaniels 7y ago
    That comment inspires joy! I'm writing a tool that would jump at the chance of using limited access API keys than having the whole kingdom in my hand!
  - lfaoro 7y ago
    thank you John
tomschlick 7y ago
Shameless plug: After doing this kind of thing manually for a while, I created a service a few years ago to backup and alert you on DNS changes for all of your providers (CF, AWS, DO, Linode, etc). It's free for one domain if anyone wants to take it for a spin: https://zonewatcher.com/ https://zonewatcher.com/
yoran 7y ago
I added an equivalent script after we moved to Cloudflare. I found it's easy to make a mistake in the Cloudflare DNS web interface, e.g. it's easy to accidentally remove an entry. Now, at every deploy to production, we do a backup of the DNS configuration on Cloudflare and save it on S3. This hardly costs us anything as each backup is only a small text file. But I now feel much more comfortable when editing our DNS config.
- pronoiac 7y ago
  For text, I'd lean to preserving that in a git repo instead.
  - yoran 7y ago
    Hmmm that's not a bad idea actually. Easy to get a history by looking at the commits. Thanks!
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    Or even use a git-repository as your source of DNS truth! https://dns-api.com/ https://dns-api.com/ is my approach to that problem.
- lfaoro 7y ago
  Would you like to have the tool automatically export all your DNS records to an S3 bucket? `--export=s3`, `--export=gcs`
- nodesocket 7y ago
  You can also use Terraform to manage CloudFlare DNS, and you get history, backups, consistency, and change management all for free. Just push the Terraform repo up to GitHub or GitBucket.
hugoromano 7y ago
Well done. But you can use cf-terraforming easily. "cf-terraforming is a command line utility to facilitate terraforming your existing Cloudflare resources." https://github.com/cloudflare/cf-terraforming https://github.com/cloudflare/cf-terraforming
- mugsie 7y ago
  terraform != text/dns Lots of DNS tools speak text/dns natively - and being able to easily get all zones in that format makes things like export / point in time backups much easier.
apple4ever 7y ago
This is REALLY cool! I'll be using this a lot!

28 points by lfaoro 7y ago

NikolaeVarius 7y ago

I too enjoy taking my keys to the kingdom and piping a bash script with it to do stuff.

01emanresu 7y ago

Cool tool! But why would I use this over dnscontrol, Terraform or OctoDNS?

mugsie 7y ago
text/dns is a standard way to move DNS zones around - this means you can export this to a file, and possibly import it elsewhere, or just archive it as a point in time backup

mjlee 7y ago

If anybody from Cloudflare sees this - this is another good reason to add multiple API keys with permissions!

jgrahamc 7y ago
That's coming.
- mjlee 7y ago
  Brilliant - looking forward to it!
- stedaniels 7y ago
  That comment inspires joy! I'm writing a tool that would jump at the chance of using limited access API keys than having the whole kingdom in my hand!
- lfaoro 7y ago
  thank you John

tomschlick 7y ago

Shameless plug: After doing this kind of thing manually for a while, I created a service a few years ago to backup and alert you on DNS changes for all of your providers (CF, AWS, DO, Linode, etc). It's free for one domain if anyone wants to take it for a spin: https://zonewatcher.com/ https://zonewatcher.com/

yoran 7y ago

I added an equivalent script after we moved to Cloudflare. I found it's easy to make a mistake in the Cloudflare DNS web interface, e.g. it's easy to accidentally remove an entry. Now, at every deploy to production, we do a backup of the DNS configuration on Cloudflare and save it on S3. This hardly costs us anything as each backup is only a small text file. But I now feel much more comfortable when editing our DNS config.

pronoiac 7y ago
For text, I'd lean to preserving that in a git repo instead.
- yoran 7y ago
  Hmmm that's not a bad idea actually. Easy to get a history by looking at the commits. Thanks!
- stevekemp 7y ago
  Or even use a git-repository as your source of DNS truth! https://dns-api.com/ https://dns-api.com/ is my approach to that problem.
lfaoro 7y ago
Would you like to have the tool automatically export all your DNS records to an S3 bucket? `--export=s3`, `--export=gcs`
nodesocket 7y ago
You can also use Terraform to manage CloudFlare DNS, and you get history, backups, consistency, and change management all for free. Just push the Terraform repo up to GitHub or GitBucket.

hugoromano 7y ago

Well done. But you can use cf-terraforming easily. "cf-terraforming is a command line utility to facilitate terraforming your existing Cloudflare resources." https://github.com/cloudflare/cf-terraforming https://github.com/cloudflare/cf-terraforming

mugsie 7y ago
terraform != text/dns Lots of DNS tools speak text/dns natively - and being able to easily get all zones in that format makes things like export / point in time backups much easier.

apple4ever 7y ago

This is REALLY cool! I'll be using this a lot!