Cloudflare Vibe SDK: Build AI Web Apps
In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, AI-powered tools are transforming how we build applications. From code completion to entire application generation, these assistants promise to boost productivity and accelerate innovation. However, many of the most powerful platforms are closed-source, locking developers into specific ecosystems. Cloudflare has changed the game by open-sourcing Vibe SDK, a revolutionary tool that allows you to build and deploy full-stack applications from a single sentence, running on a platform that you own and control.
This article explores everything you need to know about Cloudflare's Vibe SDK. You'll learn what Vibe SDK is and the powerful Cloudflare technologies that underpin it, see how the public sandbox generates complete applications from simple text prompts with interactive debugging capabilities, and understand how to deploy your own private, self-hosted instance of the Vibe SDK, giving you a powerful, customizable AI coding platform for yourself or your entire team.
What is Cloudflare Vibe SDK?
At its core, Vibe SDK is an open-source, full-stack AI web application generator. You provide a prompt describing the application you want to build, and an AI agent plans, codes, debugs, and deploys it for you. But to call it just another "prompt-to-code" tool would be a significant understatement. Vibe SDK is a complete, production-ready platform that you can run and customize yourself.
More than just a "prompt-to-code" toy
Unlike simple code generation toys that spit out a single block of code, Vibe SDK orchestrates the entire application development lifecycle. It's a cohesive package that includes a frontend interface, an AI agent backend, a sandboxed execution environment for live previews, and a direct deployment pipeline.
Furthermore, it is released under the permissive MIT License. This is a crucial distinction. It means you have the freedom to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and even sell your own versions of the platform. You truly own the code and the instance you deploy, freeing you from the constraints and potential costs of proprietary, closed-source competitors.
The power of the Cloudflare ecosystem
Vibe SDK is not just an application but a showcase of the power and integration of Cloudflare's developer platform. It is built entirely on Cloudflare's global edge network, leveraging a suite of modern, serverless technologies. Understanding these components helps appreciate why Vibe SDK is so fast, scalable, and efficient.
The user interface is built with React and Vite, providing a fast, modern, and responsive experience for interacting with the AI. The logic is powered by Cloudflare Workers, a serverless execution environment that runs your code on Cloudflare's global network, close to your users. This eliminates the need to manage servers and ensures low latency.
For complex operations requiring state, like managing the AI agent's thought process, Vibe SDK uses Durable Objects. These provide transactional, single-threaded storage, ensuring consistency during the complex code generation process. Data persistence is handled by Cloudflare D1, a serverless SQLite database used in conjunction with the Drizzle ORM for type-safe database queries.
Vibe SDK can connect to multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) like Google Gemini. All AI requests are routed through the Cloudflare AI Gateway, which provides invaluable caching, rate limiting, and analytics, significantly reducing token costs and improving performance. Application templates and other assets are stored in Cloudflare R2, an S3-compatible object storage solution without the costly egress fees.
The platform utilizes Workers for Platforms, a powerful feature that allows you to deploy user code (the generated apps) in fully isolated, secure environments. This is the magic that allows Vibe SDK to be a multi-tenant platform, capable of safely running thousands of distinct applications.
This integrated stack means you get a highly scalable, globally distributed AI coding platform with minimal operational overhead.
Exploring the public sandbox
Before deploying your own instance, the best way to understand the power of Vibe SDK is to use the public sandbox at build.cloudflare.dev. This live demo allows anyone to experience the full application generation process firsthand. You can log in using your GitHub account for authentication and start generating applications.
Generating your first app
The interface presents a main text box where you can enter a clear and descriptive request for your application. For example, entering Build a kanban board application for developers initiates the generation process. Immediately, the AI agent named "Orange" springs to life. The screen splits into a chat and generation status panel on the left, and a file tree and code viewer on the right.
The AI-powered development process
Vibe SDK doesn't just blindly generate code. It follows a structured, multi-phase process that mimics how a human developer might approach a new project.
The AI first sets up the basic project structure during the bootstrapping project phase, including configuration files like tsconfig.json and tailwind.config.js. You can see these files appear in the file explorer on the right.
The generating blueprint phase is one of the most impressive steps. The AI creates a Blueprint.md file, which is a detailed project plan that outlines the application description, dependencies (like React, TailwindCSS, Dnd Kit for drag-and-drop), views (different pages and components such as Landing Page, Board View, Task Modal), and user flow (how a user will navigate and interact with the application). This planning phase ensures the AI has a clear and coherent strategy before writing a single line of functional code, leading to much better results.
# Kanban Board Application
## Description
A developer-focused task management application with drag-and-drop functionality
## Dependencies
- React 18
- TailwindCSS
- Dnd Kit
- TypeScript
## Views
- Landing Page: Welcome screen with quick start guide
- Board View: Main kanban interface with columns
- Task Modal: Detailed task editing interface
## User Flow
Users create boards, add tasks to columns, and drag tasks between
workflow stages (To Do, In Progress, Done)
With the blueprint complete, the AI begins phase-wise code generation during the generating code phase. It systematically works through the plan, building the application piece by piece. You see status updates like "Implementing Phase 1: Stunning Frontend Foundation & Core Kanban" and "Implementing Phase 2: Task Detail Views, Board Creation & API Validation". As it works, files are created and populated with code in real-time, which you can inspect directly in the UI.
Within about a minute, the initial code generation completes, and a live preview of the brand-new Kanban board application appears on the right side of the screen.
Interactive debugging and iteration
No AI is perfect, and sometimes the first draft of an application might have bugs or missing features. This is where Vibe SDK's interactive chat truly shines. You can communicate directly with the AI to refine the application.
After creating a board in the new Kanban app, you might find that you can't add new tasks. Describing the problem to the AI in the chat box (for example, Error when adding new task, review for errors) triggers the AI to acknowledge the problem and start a "Deep Debugging" process. It analyzes the existing code, investigates the error, and formulates a plan to fix it.
The AI then modifies the necessary files to resolve the bug. The file tree and code update automatically, and the live preview refreshes with the corrected application. This iterative feedback loop is incredibly powerful. It transforms the AI from a simple code generator into a collaborative development partner, allowing you to build and perfect your application without ever leaving the browser.
One-click deployment from the sandbox
Once you're satisfied with your application, you can deploy it to the world. In the bottom left panel, you see a "Ready to Deploy" section. Clicking the red Deploy to Cloudflare button packages your application and deploys it using the Workers for Platforms infrastructure. After a few moments, you receive a public URL where you can access your live application.
Deploying your own private Vibe SDK instance
While the public sandbox is fantastic for experimentation, the real power of Vibe SDK is unleashed when you deploy your own private instance. This gives you a dedicated, customizable AI coding environment for your personal projects or your organization.
There are two primary methods for deployment: a simple one-click button and a more manual local setup for advanced customization.
Prerequisites and configuration
Before you begin, you need to have a few things ready. Deploying a platform like this involves some initial setup and costs.
You need a Cloudflare account with the Workers Paid Plan (starting at ~$5/month) and the Workers for Platforms subscription (starting at ~$25/month). You also need a domain name registered with Cloudflare that you will use to host your Vibe SDK instance.
Vibe SDK requires an LLM to function. By default, it's configured for the Google Gemini API. You need to get an API key from the Google AI Studio. You can also configure it to use other models like those from OpenAI or Anthropic. The deployment process requires connecting to a GitHub account to fork the repository and manage the application code.
You also need to generate several secret keys for security, such as a JWT_SECRET for session management and a WEBHOOK_SECRET. These should be long, random strings.
Deployment method 1: the one-click "Deploy to Cloudflare" button
This is the easiest way to get your own instance up and running.
The official Cloudflare Vibe SDK repository at github.com/cloudflare/vibesdk features a prominent "Deploy to Cloudflare" button on the README page. Clicking this button redirects you to your Cloudflare dashboard, specifically to a "Create an application" wizard pre-configured for Vibe SDK.
You authorize Cloudflare to access your GitHub account, and it creates a private fork of the Vibe SDK repository for your instance. The wizard prompts you to name and create the necessary Cloudflare resources: a KV namespace for key-value storage, a D1 database for structured data, and an R2 bucket for object storage.
The most critical step is entering environment variables. You must carefully fill in all the required environment variables, including GOOGLE_AI_STUDIO_API_KEY (your Gemini API key), JWT_SECRET (your randomly generated secret for sessions), WEBHOOK_SECRET and SECRETS_ENCRYPTION_KEY (more random secrets for security), ALLOWED_EMAIL (the email address of the user allowed to access the app), and CUSTOM_DOMAIN (the domain you configured in the prerequisites).
Once all fields are filled, clicking the "Deploy" button at the bottom triggers Cloudflare to provision all the resources, build the application, and deploy it to the Workers platform. After a few minutes, your personal Vibe SDK instance is live on your custom domain.
Deployment method 2: manual local setup and deployment
For developers who want to customize the SDK's source code before deploying or prefer a command-line workflow, a manual setup is ideal.
You can clone the Vibe SDK repository to your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/cloudflare/vibesdk.git
After changing into the newly created project directory:
cd vibesdk
Vibe SDK is optimized for Bun, a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime. Using Bun is recommended for the best performance:
bun install
The repository includes a helpful script to guide you through configuration:
bun run setup
The script asks for all the necessary information in your terminal: your Cloudflare Account ID, your Gemini API key, your custom domain, and helps you generate the required secrets. This process creates the necessary .env files to configure your project.
Once the local setup is complete, you can deploy the application to your Cloudflare account using the Wrangler CLI, which is Cloudflare's command-line tool. The project likely includes a deploy script you can run. This method gives you full control over the codebase, allowing you to tweak the AI's behavior, modify the UI, or integrate different services before pushing it to production.
Understanding the Vibe SDK architecture
To truly appreciate what Vibe SDK does, it's helpful to visualize its operational flow. The process can be broken down into a few key stages, creating a powerful loop of generation, preview, and iteration.
The process starts with the user's natural language description. The prompt is sent to a stateful AI agent via the Cloudflare AI Gateway. The agent analyzes the request and generates a detailed blueprint for the application's architecture and features during the plan phase.
During the generate phase, the agent writes the application code incrementally, tackling the project in logical phases. This allows for more complex and robust application structures. As code is generated, it is executed within a secure, isolated sandbox container during the preview phase, providing the user with an instant, real-time preview of the application.
The user interacts with the live preview and provides feedback to the AI via chat during the iterate phase. This feedback initiates a new cycle, where the agent debugs or adds features based on the user's input. Once the user is satisfied, the final application container is packaged and deployed as a Cloudflare Worker during the deploy phase, making it instantly available globally on the edge network.
This elegant architecture (Prompt, Plan, Generate, Preview, Iterate, Deploy) is what makes Vibe SDK a formidable tool for rapid application development.
Final thoughts
Cloudflare’s Vibe SDK is a major step forward for AI-assisted development. It turns a production-ready, full-stack app generator into an open-source, self-hosted platform, giving developers the freedom to run their own AI coding assistant on infrastructure they control. Built on a modern, scalable, serverless stack, the platform and the apps it creates are ready for high performance and future growth.
Vibe SDK will not replace the judgment and experience of a senior engineer, but it is a powerful accelerator. It helps you prototype ideas quickly, ship internal tools faster, and explore what generative AI can do in real, hands-on projects.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.