Cloudflare ddclient Guide

I wanted to use DNS for a personal project and went down the Dynamic DNS rabbit hole. I settled on hosting a DNS zone in Cloudflare and using ddclient to keep a record updated.

I found some info online for 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.

Usage

1. Have a Cloudflare account and DNS zone
2. Create the DNS record ddclient should manage
3. Create a Cloudflare API token. Use the 'Edit Zone DNS' template. For 'Zone Resources' select 'All zones' (ref)
4. Clone this repo
5. Update the following in ddclient.conf.
   • password=
   • zone=
   • RECORD_TO_UPDATE
6. 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