We’re open-sourcing our privacy proxy CLI
Key Points
- pvcli CLI open-sourced
- Runs full Oblivious HTTP flows end-to-end
- Apache-2.0 license; contributions welcome
Summary
Cloudflare has open-sourced pvcli (privacy-client), a command-line tool that executes full Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) flows end-to-end (client → relay → gateway → origin). pvcli is released under the Apache-2.0 license and is intended to make debugging, testing, and incident response for privacy-preserving protocols much easier for engineers working with relays, gateways, and origins.
Key Points
- Purpose: reproduce and debug multi-party OHTTP flows locally or against live relays/gateways to reduce development and incident-response friction.
- Usage: a single command executes a complete OHTTP request, e.g.
pvcli --ohttp --first-hop https://relay-cloudflare.ohttp.info --proxy https://gateway.ohttp.info -X POST --header "content-type: application/json" --data '{"test":1}' https://target.ohttp.info/anything. - Benefits: simplifies troubleshooting of each OHTTP step (key fetch, client encryption, relay stripping, gateway decryption, origin request, and response encryption) so you can isolate failures quickly.
- Engineering workflow: useful for integration tests, CI debugging, reproducing customer issues, and validating relay/gateway configuration changes.
- Implementation and compatibility: built with Cloudflare’s production experience in mind (mentions of Rust, QUIC/HTTP3 in project context); intended to work with existing OHTTP relays and gateways.
- License and contributions: released under Apache-2.0 and open for contributions from the community.
If you operate or integrate with OHTTP-based privacy services (e.g., privacy proxies, gateways, or client integrations), pvcli lets you run and inspect full request/response flows without assembling custom tooling.