Simplifying Batch Record Edits in the API

Efficiency, scalability, and reliability are key to your DNS operations. That's why the DNSimple team has been working to minimize the time and complexity involved in making bulk changes, ensuring your updates are applied atomically, accurately, and without delays.

We wanted to improve efficiency when updating records through the API, and mitigate the need for individual API calls for each record when managing large or complex DNS configurations. Plus, further API rate limit constraints had made these bulk operations time-consuming and difficult to scale.

Our latest update removes those obstacles with a new API endpoint, making it easier and faster to manage DNS records at scale. Available to customers on our Enterprise plan.

We'll go over what this endpoint does, how it works, and how you can leverage bulk DNS editing for more efficient DNS management. If you manage a large number of domains, and you're not on the Enterprise plan, contact sales to learn more about how we can tailor our offering to your needs.

What our new API endpoint does

The batch change zone records endpoint lets you perform bulk updates to a zone. What would have required 100 API calls from your quota, you can now condense into a single API call. By passing in request parameters, you can specify any combination of creates, updates and deletes to be performed on the records in a zone, atomically.

Batch processing speeds up bulk editing your records. Records propagate to name servers immediately, just like with single-record operations, and batch size is capped at 100 operations to ensure optimal performance.

Bulk editing DNS records in the API

This new feature provides the ability to apply DNS changes in bulk to a DNS zone by calling the API endpoint.

The same validations used when creating, updating and deleting an individual zone record are applied to each zone record operated on by the API. This ensures changes are applied correctly, helping you avoid any accidental deletions or processing errors

Processing, success, and errors

All operation types are optional. You can specify any combination of creates, updates, and deletes, as long as you respect the maximum batch size.

Operations are processed in the following order to remove concerns about conflicts:

• Deletes
• Updates
• Creates

You'll see an HTTP 200 when the operation succeeds. If any of these individual actions fail, the entire API call will fail and return an error response with details about the failed operation.

Example bulk edit:

{
  "creates": [
    {
      "name": "ab",
      "type": "A",
      "content": "3.2.3.4",
      "ttl": 3600
    },
    {
      "name": "ab",
      "type": "A",
      "content": "4.2.3.4",
      "ttl": 3600
    }
  ],
  "updates": [
    {
      "id": 67622534,
      "content": "3.2.3.40"
    },
    {
      "id": 67622537,
      "content": "5.2.3.40"
    }
  ],
  "deletes": [
    {
      "id": 67622509
    },
    {
      "id": 67622527
    }
  ]
}

Viewing your changes on the dashboard

In your DNSimple account, you'll see the same information as you do for single record operations, just applied to your batch edit.

• Which records were created, updated, or deleted in a batch
• The exact batch size
• Timestamps

This simplifies auditing and debugging your DNS changes.

You can read more about batch updating your DNS in the API in Batch change zone records in our developer documentation, or take a look at our OpenAPI spec. Our Ruby, Go, and Python API clients have also been updated to support calling of the endpoint through them.

Scale your DNS management

Bulk editing with DNSimple's new batch endpoint makes DNS record management faster, safer, and more scalable than ever before. Whether you're migrating records, automating infrastructure, or managing hundreds of domains, we help you move faster with confidence.

If you're using (or planning to use) this endpoint, or if there are other features you'd like to see us add to make your DNS management easier, let us know — we always appreciate hearing from you.

If you're an Enterprise customer, you can start using this feature today. If you're not yet on the Enterprise plan, get in touch to learn more. We'd love to talk.

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Stella Lok

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