Confusing documentation on purge API

Developers API
1

Re this Cloudflare API v4 Documentation

curl -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/023e105f4ecef8ad9ca31a8372d0c353/purge_cache" \
         -H "X-Auth-Email: [email protected]" \
         -H "X-Auth-Key: c2547eb745079dac9320b638f5e225cf483cc5cfdda41" \
         -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
         --data '{"files":["http://www.example.com/css/styles.css",{"url":"http://www.example.com/cat_picture.jpg","headers":{"Origin":"https://www.cloudflare.com","CF-IPCountry":"US","CF-Device-Type":"desktop"}}]}

What is “files” vs “url” in this?

The file URL is http://www.example.com/css/styles.css, so whats the url field of http://www.example.com/cat_picture.jpg

So confusing.

First I tried to purge a particular resource as follows:

{
"files":["<some cached URL here>"
]
}

This returned success:true, but there was still a cache HIT. So this actually didnt work.

Next I tried with:

{
"files":["<some cached URL here>",
  {
      "headers": {
      "Origin": "https://www<domain>"
      }
  }
]
}

This gave an error: “message”: “Request must contain one of "purge_everything", "files", "tags", "hosts" or "prefixes"”

Finally I tried with:

{
"files":["<some cached URL here>",
  {
      "url": "<some cached URL here>",
      "headers": {
      "Origin": "https://www<domain>"
      }
  }
]
}

This returned success:true, and resulted in a cache MISS (yah!).

So the Q is, whats the difference between files and url?

2

File is the actual resource that sits in the cache. URL is the way it’s identified. Other purge methods let Enterprise Plan users purge that file using a different identifier such as tags, hostname, or prefix (sort of like a wildcard). I think the example makes it overly complicated. I believe this is all you need:

3

Aiiii. I see that that my post above crapofied the 3rd part of my post after “Finally I tried with:” since I’d not marked it as code. Corrected now.

4

I dont think so. As you can see above, my first attempt was exactly this.

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