Clear CloudFlare Cache from VSTS

Cache everything and purge it when releasing a new version from Visual Studio Team Services

16 April 2017

Recently I created a website for a client, it was a static generated website, a promosite with only one page.

This gave me some nice opportunities for trying out some nice things. It's all generated with gulp, much like this site - however it's optimized to be a single page.

It's code is in VSTS, and I set it up to build whenever we create a Pull Request. This works very well, and in one week we did around 140 pull requests - with code reviews.

I found a bug that made it impossible to run Gulp 4 with the Gulp task, and created an issue on the bugtracker. To get around this I created a PowerShell that invokes the local gulp, and that fixed everything.

Releasing the site was done with VSTS as well. A small note to take here is due to everything being HTML, it's set to be cached on Cloudflare for the best performance - to clear this cache, you need to login to cloudflare and press a button or use their API.

I like automated things and created this script:

$AUTH_USER = ''
$AUTH_TOKEN = ''
$ZONE_KEY = ''

$Headers = @{
    'X-Auth-Key'=$AUTH_TOKEN;
    'X-Auth-Email'=$AUTH_USER;
    'Content-Type'='application/json'
}
$Body = @{
    'purge_everything'=[boolean]'True'
} | ConvertTo-Json

Invoke-RestMethod https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$ZONE_KEY/purge_cache -Method DELETE -Headers $Headers -Body $Body -ContentType 'application/json'

On the Cloudflare documentation there is an example using curl, but it all being windows I rewrote that in powershell, and it works just great.

This script clears everything, I could have extended it, to clear only the changed files from the release, but this seemed like overkill - taking everything into account.