How to purge Cloudflare cache from your phone
You can purge a Cloudflare cache from a phone in three ways: the Cloudflare dashboard in a mobile browser, an API call from a terminal app, or a native app that talks to the Cloudflare API directly. The dashboard works but takes around ten taps and a login; a native app takes three.
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The situation is always the same. You are not at your desk, someone reports that the site is showing an old price, a stale banner or yesterday's stock level, and the fix is thirty seconds of work — if you can get to it.
Option 1 — the Cloudflare dashboard
The dashboard is responsive and it does work on a phone. The path is: open dash.cloudflare.com, sign in, complete two-factor authentication, pick the account, find the zone in the list, open Caching, open Configuration, scroll to Purge Cache, choose the purge type, confirm.
- Costs nothing and needs no setup. It is already there.
- Around ten taps, several of them on controls sized for a mouse.
- A full login every time, including the second factor, because mobile sessions expire quickly.
- Zone lists are painful once you manage more than a handful of domains.
For someone who purges twice a year, this is the correct answer and the rest of this page is over-engineering.
Option 2 — an API call from a terminal app
With a terminal app such as iSH, Termux or an SSH session to your own server, the API is one request away:
curl -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/ZONE_ID/purge_cache" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{"purge_everything":true}'Or for specific files:
curl -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/ZONE_ID/purge_cache" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{"files":["https://example.com/style.css"]}'- Fast and scriptable, once it is set up.
- You need the zone ID, which is a 32-character hex string you have to look up somewhere — usually the dashboard you were trying to avoid.
- The token ends up in your shell history or in a file on the device, which is worse storage than a Keychain entry.
- Typing a curl command on a phone keyboard is its own punishment.
Option 3 — a native app
A native client stores the token in the system's secure store, keeps the zone list on the device so it is there the moment the app opens, and reduces the operation to: open, tap the zone, confirm.
This is what FlarePurge is. It is free, it has no backend, and the traffic goes from your device straight to api.cloudflare.com over TLS with certificate pinning — there is no server of ours in the path, because there is no server of ours.
| Dashboard | curl | Native app | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup needed | None | Token + zone ID | Token, once |
| Taps to purge | ~10 | Retype a command | 3 |
| Login each time | Yes, plus 2FA | No | No |
| Token storage | n/a | Shell history or a file | System secure store |
| Works with many zones | Poorly | One ID at a time | Grouped and searchable |
| Selective purge | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Bulk across zones | No | Only if you script it | Yes |
Which to pick
If you purge occasionally, use the dashboard — it is already installed. If you live in a terminal and manage one zone, curl is fine. If you manage several domains for several clients and the request arrives while you are on a train, that is the case a native app was built for.
Whichever you choose, create a scoped token rather than using the Global API Key: here is how.