I am extremely happy with the services from cloudflare, and with my minions project I wanted an easy way to know where they all were. So I did my research and finally narrowed down a way to use ddclient to update cloudflare.

Installing DDClient to function with CloudFlare on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

1. Create a domain entry on CloudFlare.com for your fqdn… mycomputer.example.com or whatever you want.domain.com

2. install perl and required modules…

apt-get install perl libjson-any-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl

3. download the latest ddclient files from the official project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ddclient/
at the time of this writing…

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ddclient/ddclient/ddclient-3.8.2/ddclient-3.8.2.tar.gz

4. Untar ddclient files…

tar -xzf ddclient-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd ddclient-3.8.2

5. Download patch file from http://blog.peter-r.co.uk/cloudflare-ddclient-patch.html
at time of this writing…

wget http://blog.peter-r.co.uk/uploads/ddclient-3.8.0-cloudflare-22-6-2014.patch

6. perform patch…

patch < ddclient-3.8.0-cloudflare-22-6-2014.patch

7. Manually install…

mkdir /etc/ddclient
mkdir /var/cache/ddclient
cp ddclient /usr/sbin/
cp sample-etc_ddclient.conf /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf
cp sample-etc_rc.d_init.d_ddclient.ubuntu /etc/init.d/ddclient

8. Edit configuration and make it look like this: (make special note of where I put commas)

vi /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf

daemon=300
syslog=yes
mail=root
mail-failure=root
pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
ssl=yes

ssl=yes
protocol=cloudflare,
use=web
server=www.cloudflare.com,
zone=example.com,
login=your@email.com,
password=your-api-key-here
mycomputer.example.com,

9. start the service…

service ddclient start

then to see what happened… logs are pushed into the syslog file… so tail that.

tail /var/log/syslog

10. To ensure ddclient runs at startup… do the following:

sudo update-rc.d -f ddclient remove
sudo update-rc.d ddclient defaults

It took a bit of research and troubleshooting to get this to work consistently… but hope this helps someone. Let me know if you have any questions.