Cloudflare SDK reference
Read time: 5 minutes
Last edited: Dec 14, 2024
A context is a generalized way of referring to the people, services, machines, or other resources that encounter feature flags in your product. To learn more about upgrading, read Cloudflare 1.x to 2.0 migration guide and Best practices for upgrading users to contexts.
Overview
This topic documents how to get started with the Cloudflare SDK, and links to reference information on all of the supported features.
LaunchDarkly's SDKs are open source. In addition to this reference guide, we provide source, API reference documentation, and sample applications:
Resource | Location |
---|---|
SDK API documentation | SDK API docs |
GitHub repository | js-core/packages/sdk/cloudflare |
Sample application | Example app |
Published module | npm, jsr |
The Cloudflare SDK is designed to be used with one of the LaunchDarkly client-side SDKs as follows:
- The Cloudflare SDK gets all flags at the edge for a given context, and bootstraps them onto a cached payload
- The client-side SDK initializes the bootstrapped payload
- The client-side SDK evaluates the flags and sends events back to LaunchDarkly
If you are using Cloudflare SDK version 2.3.0 or later, then the Cloudflare SDK can send events back to LaunchDarkly directly. Using a client-side SDK is not necessary. You do need to configure the SDK to enable sending events. To learn more, read Configuration.
Configure the Cloudflare integration to use this SDK successfully. To learn more, read Cloudflare.
The Cloudflare integration is only available to customers on select plans. To learn more, read about our pricing. To upgrade your plan, contact Sales.
The Cloudflare SDK uses the Cloudflare KV as a persistent feature store, without connecting to LaunchDarkly for each flag evaluation. The Cloudflare SDK uses the flag configuration in the Cloudflare KV to evaluate flags. The latency for this evaluation is similar to the latency for any other request to the Cloudflare KV, that is, extremely low. LaunchDarkly sends flag configuration changes to the Cloudflare KV as they occur.
If you are using Cloudflare SDK version 2.3.0 or later, then the Cloudflare SDK does send events back to LaunchDarkly if you configure it to do so. To learn more, read Configuration.
Get started
After you configure the Cloudflare integration process in an existing project, follow these instructions to start using the LaunchDarkly SDK in your Cloudflare Worker:
Install the SDK
First, install the LaunchDarkly SDK as a dependency in your application using your application's dependency manager.
Here's how:
Then turn on the Node.js compatibility flag in your wrangler.toml
to allow the SDK to use node:events
. Specify a build command in your wrangler.toml
to use a bundler. Using a bundler to build your edge worker is recommended by Cloudflare.
Next, import the LaunchDarkly client in your application code:
Initialize the client
After you install and import the SDK, create an instance of LDClient
. Specify your client-side ID and Cloudflare KV namespace here. The client-side ID is only used to query the KV namespace, not to connect with LaunchDarkly servers.
Here's how:
If you are using the Cloudflare SDK version 2.3.0 or later, you can optionally configure sending events during initialization. This enables Experimentation and metrics use cases. To learn more, read Experimentation and metric events.
Here's how:
The Cloudflare SDK uses a client-side ID to associate the LaunchDarkly environment with the CDN integration. Client-side IDs are specific to each project and environment. They are available from the Environments list for each project. To learn more about key types, read Keys.
Evaluate a flag
Await the waitForInitialization
function after you initialize the client. When waitForInitialization
is resolved the client can serve feature flags.
Using client
, you can check which variation a particular context will receive for a given feature flag. In your Cloudflare Worker application, place the client.variation
code so that it is invoked as needed.
Here is an example:
Example Worker
This is an example Cloudflare Worker application that initializes the ldClient and evaluates a feature flag for a context:
Read the full example in GitHub.
Promises and async
All asynchronous SDK methods that return a Promise
are compatible with then/catch
or async/await
. You can use either.
Shut down the client
If you send events, you must flush those events before your worker exits to ensure that they are sent back to LaunchDarkly. To learn more, read Flushing events.
Shut down the client when your application terminates. To learn more, read Shutting down.
Supported features
- Anonymous contexts and users
- Configuration, including
- Context configuration
- Evaluating flags
- Flag evaluation reasons
- Flushing events
- Getting all flags
- Logging configuration
- Migrations
- Secure mode
- Sending custom events
- Shutting down
Use in Cloudflare Workers only
This SDK is intended only for use in multi-user Cloudflare Workers only. Choose one of the other JavaScript-based SDKs for browser, server, or mobile environments.
Client-side browser environments:
- For React applications, read the React Web SDK reference.
- For Vue applications, read the Vue SDK reference.
- For all other client-side browser JavaScript applications, read the JavaScript SDK reference.
Non-browser environments:
- For server-side Node applications, read the Node.js SDK reference (server-side).
- For client-side Node applications, read the Node.js SDK reference (client-side).
- For React Native mobile applications read the React Native SDK reference.
- For Electron desktop applications, read the Electron SDK reference.
To learn more about LaunchDarkly's different SDK types, read Client-side, server-side, and edge SDKs.