Using JSON

Cloudflare’s DNS over HTTPS endpoint also supports JSON format for querying DNS data. For lack of an agreed upon JSON schema for DNS over HTTPS in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Cloudflare has chosen to follow the same schema as Google’s DNS over HTTPS resolver.

JSON formatted queries are sent using a GET request. When making requests using GET, the DNS query is encoded into the URL. The client should include an HTTP Accept request header field with a MIME type of application/dns-json to indicate that the client is able to accept a JSON response from the DNS over HTTPS resolver.

Supported parameters

Field	Required?	Description	Default
name	Yes	Query name.	-
type	No	Query type (either a numeric value or text ↗).	A
do	No	DO bit - whether the client wants DNSSEC data (either empty or one of 0, false, 1, or true).	false
cd	No	CD bit - disable validation (either empty or one of 0, false, 1, or true).	false

Examples

Example request and response:

curl --header "accept: application/dns-json" "https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query?name=example.com&type=AAAA"

{
  "Status": 0,
  "TC": false,
  "RD": true,
  "RA": true,
  "AD": true,
  "CD": false,
  "Question": [
    {
      "name": "example.com.",
      "type": 28
    }
  ],
  "Answer": [
    {
      "name": "example.com.",
      "type": 28,
      "TTL": 1726,
      "data": "2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946"
    }
  ]
}

In the case of an invalid request a 400 Bad Request error is returned:

curl --header "accept: application/dns-json" "https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query?name=example.com&cd=2"

{
  "error": "Invalid CD flag `2`. Expected to be empty or one of `0`, `false`, `1`, or `true`."
}

Response fields

The following tables have more information on each response field.

Successful response

Field	Description
Status	The Response Code of the DNS Query. These are defined here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-6 ↗.
TC	If true, it means the truncated bit was set. This happens when the DNS answer is larger than a single UDP or TCP packet. TC will almost always be false with Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS because Cloudflare supports the maximum response size.
RD	If true, it means the Recursive Desired bit was set. This is always set to true for Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS.
RA	If true, it means the Recursion Available bit was set. This is always set to true for Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS.
AD	If true, it means that every record in the answer was verified with DNSSEC.
CD	If true, the client asked to disable DNSSEC validation. In this case, Cloudflare will still fetch the DNSSEC-related records, but it will not attempt to validate the records.
Question: name	The record name requested.
Question: type	The type of DNS record requested. These are defined here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-4 ↗.
Answer: name	The record owner.
Answer: type	The type of DNS record. These are defined here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-4 ↗.
Answer: TTL	The number of seconds the answer can be stored in cache before it is considered stale.
Answer: data	The value of the DNS record for the given name and type. The data will be in text for standardized record types and in hex for unknown types.
Authority: name	The record owner.
Authority: type	The type of DNS record. These are defined here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-4 ↗.
Authority: TTL	The number of seconds the answer can be stored in cache before it is considered stale.
Authority: data	The value of the DNS record for the given name and type. The data will be in text for standardized record types and in hex for unknown types.
Additional: name	The record owner.
Additional: type	The type of DNS record. These are defined here: https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-4 ↗.
Additional: TTL	The number of seconds the answer can be stored in cache before it is considered stale.
Additional: data	The value of the DNS record for the given name and type. The data will be in text for standardized record types and in hex for unknown types.
Comment	List of EDE messages. Refer to Extended DNS error codes for more information.

Error response

Field	Description
error	An explanation of the error that occurred.