Today I’m excited to announce wrangler login, an easy way to get started with Wrangler! This summer for my internship on the Workers Developer Productivity team I was tasked with helping improve the Wrangler user experience. For those who don’t know, Workers is Cloudflare’s serverless platform which allows users to deploy their software directly to Cloudflare’s edge network.

This means you can write any behaviour on requests heading to your site or even run fully fledged applications directly on the edge. Wrangler is the open-source CLI tool used to manage your Workers and has a big focus on enabling a smooth developer experience.

When I first heard I was working on Wrangler, I was excited that I would be working on such a cool product but also a little nervous. This was the first time I would be writing Rust in a professional environment, the first time making meaningful open-source contributions, and on top of that the first time doing all of this remotely. But thanks to lots of guidance and support from my mentor and team, I was able to help make the Wrangler and Workers developer experience just a little bit better.

The Problem

The main improvement I focused on this summer was the experience when getting started with Wrangler. For many of the commands to publish and develop live Workers, the user first needs to authenticate with Cloudflare. This is mainly done through the wrangler config command which has the user go create an API token and paste it into Wrangler. Creating a token involves going to the Cloudflare dashboard, going to your profile, going to the API tokens page, selecting a token template, adding your zones and accounts, and finally creating the token. While this is a completely valid authentication flow, it’s not as easy as it could be.

It could be frustrating to users who have to leave Wrangler and then possibly get lost in the wrong dashboard page or use the wrong settings for their token. When a group of intern candidates were given the task of using Wrangler, most of them got stuck on this step! Many users might forgo using Workers altogether if this is the first thing they encounter when sitting down to develop. Instead we wanted an experience where users could use their Cloudflare login (ie. their username, password, and possible two-factor authentication) and immediately be ready to go.

#wrangler #product news #serverless #cloudflare workers