Getting the Current Fastly VCL via API

Published: September 28, 2022

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Tools

This is just a quick little tip, but something I always have to look up how to do. The Fastly API has an endpoint for fetching the generated VCL for a service. The issue is that the version_id for the serivce must be provided in the request (there’s no way to say “just give me the currently active VCL”).

As such, we need to first use the List versions of a service endpoint to identify the active version. From there we can request the generated VCL.

Putting this all together, assuming you have jq installed, here’s how to do this in practice (replace FASTLY_KEY and SERVICE_ID with the correct values for your project).

For Magento Cloud environments, the Fastly Key and Service ID can be found in the /mnt/shared/fastly_tokens.txt file. "API Token" is the FASTLY_KEY and "Serivce ID" is the SERVICE_ID.

# Get the active version. In this example 105 is active
$ curl --silent -H "Fastly-Key: FASTLY_KEY" https://api.fastly.com/service/SERVICE_ID/version \
  | jq '.[] | if .active then .number else empty end'
105

# Get the VCL
$ curl -H "Fastly-Key: FASTLY_KEY" https://api.fastly.com/service/SERVICE_ID/version/105/generated_vcl
{"version":105,"service_id":"...