Cloudflare Containers Quickstart

You can now use Cloudflare Containers (Beta) to run processes which require a full Linux environment including a filesystem.

Diagram showing image build, workers, durable objects and container instances.

How it works.

wrangler dev builds container images using a Dockerfile. The docker build process runs commands from the Dockerfile to install packages and copy files. The resulting filesystem changes are captured as cacheable layers in the container image.
The image can run locally during development and gets pushed to the Cloudflare registry on deploy.
The containers key in wrangler.jsonc connects the image with a Durable Object (DO) class. The implementation of this class is exported from your worker code. It extends a Container class which itself extends DurableObject.
Container Durable Object instances map 1:1 to running containers. A worker's fetch handler can get() a container instance by name/id, and route HTTP requests to it via container.fetch(). Those requests are then forwarded by the Durable Object to the exposed port on the running container instance. Containers can spin up lazily, on the first request to the container.

Example

The example in github.com/jldec/container-demo-terminal provides a minimal implementation of the flow described above.

Flow diagram from user -> worker -> durable object -> container

The Dockerfile adds a web-based terminal called tty2web to the image.
wrangler.jsonc links the image to the ContainerClass.
index.ts is the entry point for the worker. It exports ContainerClass and uses the CONTAINER_DO binding to connect to the container. Adding a query parameter like ?id=xx will spin up multiple instances with different names.

The worker is deployed at https://container-demo-terminal.jldec.workers.dev. Visitors interact with a bash shell in the container over a websocket. This URL is protected with Cloudflare Access.

Screenshot of terminal running top in the container

Cloudflare's dashboard provides nice observability.

Cloudflare Container dashboard

Sandboxes FTW

What if you could provide your users with their own on-demand containers, where they can safely run AI-generated code? 🤖

The Cloudflare Sandbox SDK is built on Cloudflare Containers. It includes a general purpose container with git, Python, nodejs and an API to run commands and streaming responses.

Check out the documentation for more details.

Conclusion

I hope this quick intro helps to demystify Cloudflare Containers and Durable Objects a little bit. Please reach out on Twitter with questions or feedback.