Worker Route Registration Does Not Auto-Create DNS Records
Worker Route Registration Does Not Auto-Create DNS Records
Section titled “Worker Route Registration Does Not Auto-Create DNS Records”Context
Section titled “Context”When wrangler deploy --env dev registers a custom route (api.adventive.dev/*) via
routes in wrangler.toml, Cloudflare registers the route trigger on the edge but does
not automatically create a DNS record for the hostname. Without a proxied DNS record,
the hostname doesn’t resolve and the route is unreachable, curl api.adventive.dev returns
Could not resolve host.
Decision
Section titled “Decision”DNS records must be created manually (or via Terraform/API) before or alongside the first deploy. The record required for a Workers-only hostname (no origin server) is:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | AAAA |
| Name | api (i.e., api.adventive.dev) |
| Content | 100:: |
| Proxy status | Proxied (orange cloud) |
100:: is the standard IPv6 discard-prefix used as a placeholder for Workers-only routes.
Cloudflare intercepts the request at the edge before it ever reaches a real host.
Consequence
Section titled “Consequence”Add DNS record creation as an explicit step in the per-environment deploy runbook
(RUNBOOK.md §Deploy procedure). For stg and prd, provision the AAAA record before the
first wrangler deploy. For dev, the record was created manually on 2026-04-29.
This is not a Cloudflare bug, it is by design. Route registration and DNS are separate Cloudflare primitives. The behavior is consistent with how Cloudflare Workers routes work for all custom hostnames.