What causes "no input provided" in cloudflare/cloudflared?

Pass the target hostname or URL as an argument, e.g. `cloudflared access ssh myapp.example.com`.

no input provided

Error message

no input provided

What it means

parseURL in cmd/cloudflared/access/validation.go converts a user-supplied hostname/URL into a *url.URL for Access subcommands (ssh, ssh-gen, curl-style helpers). It rejects empty input outright with this error before any parsing is attempted, because there is nothing to build an Access URL from.

Source

Thrown at cmd/cloudflared/access/validation.go:50

func bracketBareIPv6(input string) string {
	prefix := input[:strings.Index(input, "://")+3]
	rest := input[len(prefix):]
	host := rest
	if i := strings.IndexAny(rest, "/?#"); i >= 0 {
		host = rest[:i]
	}
	if net.ParseIP(host) != nil && strings.Contains(host, ":") {
		return prefix + "[" + host + "]" + rest[len(host):]
	}
	return input
}

// parseHostname will attempt to convert a user provided URL string into a string with some light error checking on
// certain expectations from the URL.
// Will convert all HTTP URLs to HTTPS
func parseURL(input string) (*url.URL, error) {
	if input == "" {
		return nil, errors.New("no input provided")
	}
	if !strings.HasPrefix(input, "https://") && !strings.HasPrefix(input, "http://") {
		input = fmt.Sprintf("https://%s", input)
	}
	input = bracketBareIPv6(input)
	url, err := url.ParseRequestURI(input)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("failed to parse as URL: %w", err)
	}
	if url.Scheme != "https" {
		url.Scheme = "https"
	}
	if url.Host == "" {
		return nil, errors.New("failed to parse Host")
	}
	host, err := httpguts.PunycodeHostPort(url.Host)
	if err != nil || host == "" {
		return nil, err

View on GitHub (pinned to 2253eeeb25)

Solutions

Pass the target hostname or URL as an argument, e.g. `cloudflared access ssh myapp.example.com`.
In scripts, guard before invoking: `[ -n "$TARGET" ] || { echo 'target required'; exit 1; }`.
Check quoting so the argument is not accidentally consumed or emptied by the shell.

Example fix

# before
cloudflared access ssh $TARGET   # TARGET unset
# after
: "${TARGET:?target host is required}"
cloudflared access ssh "$TARGET"

Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

func requireTarget(args []string) (string, error) {
    if len(args) == 0 || strings.TrimSpace(args[0]) == "" {
        return "", errors.New("target hostname is required")
    }
    return strings.TrimSpace(args[0]), nil
}

Try / catch

url, err := parseURL(input)
if err != nil {
    if err.Error() == "no input provided" {
        return fmt.Errorf("usage: cloudflared access <cmd> <hostname>")
    }
    return err
}

Prevention

Use `: "${VAR:?message}"` shell guards for variables forwarded to cloudflared.
Echo the command with args before executing in scripts to catch empty arguments.
Wrap access commands in a function that validates the positional host argument first.

When it happens

Trigger: Calling `cloudflared access ssh`, `access ssh-gen`, or any command whose argument flows through getAppURLFromArgs/parseURL with an empty string — e.g. `cloudflared access ssh ""` or a shell variable like $HOST that is unset/empty.

Common situations: Scripts where the target host variable is unset; wrappers that forward empty args; typos that drop the positional argument entirely.

Understand the failure class

Background: "missing required argument" and "the following required arguments were not provided": what required-argument errors mean and how to fix them — this error's family across 20 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of cloudflare/cloudflared@2253eeeb25 (2026-09-06). Data as JSON: /api/errors/431f026461336572. Report an issue: GitHub.