Cloudflare Open-Sources Forge, a Pluggable Pipeline for Generating SDKs, CLIs, and Docs

Cloudflare has introduced Forge, an open-source, pluggable generation pipeline designed to create SDKs, CLIs, documentation, and libraries. The tool addresses the complexity of managing Cloudflare’s API, which contains over 3,500 operations spread across hundreds of services written in languages like Rust, Go, TypeScript, and Python. By treating agents as customers, Cloudflare aims to provide the necessary interfaces—such as MCP servers and API SDKs—that are now essential for modern products.

Solving Scale and Coordination Issues

Cloudflare previously relied on hosted products that failed to handle the scale and coordination required for their API ecosystem. Changes made by one team often inadvertently broke the generation pipeline, leading to release delays and significant coordination overhead. Forge runs directly in CI/CD pipelines, similar to AI code reviewers, ensuring that every change is validated. It generates preview builds of the CLI, docs, and SDKs with specific changes highlighted, allowing teams to test before merging.

Flexible Generation and Chaining

The pipeline is extensible beyond standard language targets. It supports generating Cap’n Web, Cloudflare’s RPC system, directly from OpenAPI specs, enabling bindings from Workers to other APIs. The architecture allows for chaining transformers, where the output of one generator serves as the input for another. This flexibility allows users to choose their target language for CLIs or SDKs, such as generating a Python CLI from a Python SDK, rather than being constrained by the tool's default stack.

API Versioning and Open Source Commitment

Forge supports Cloudflare’s strategy for API versioning. While the v4 API has remained the primary version for 10 years, internal changes have accumulated that would typically warrant major version bumps. The new pipeline enables the release of new major versions without breaking existing clients or SDKs. Cloudflare plans to use Forge to generate SDKs for TypeScript, Rust, Python, Go, PHP, and Terraform, with particular attention to the rigor required for Terraform provider upgrades. The project is released under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing anyone to deploy, modify, and run it privately or publicly for free.